A Puck in Me is a Friend Indeed
by Shadow Master
Summary: (BtVS/Gargoyles/Maleficent/Harry Potter) Halloween. It's a night when you can pretend to be ANYONE or ANYTHING but in almost all cases it's only metaphorical. On the Hellmouth though it's about to become literal.
1. Chapter 1

"A Puck in Me is a Friend Indeed" by Shadow Master aka Ryley Breen

(BtVS/Gargoyles/Maleficent/Harry Potter)

email:ryley[underscore]breen

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the copyrighted material contained herein. They are the rightful property of their creators and associated companies. I make no profit off this whatsoever and I have no intent to change this at any point in the future. I write because I enjoy doing so and because there are those who enjoy reading my works. Therefore I would appreciate it if the owners and associated companies refrained from taking any sort of legal action against me. I can assure each and every one of them that whatever amount of money they manage to get from me won't even be enough to cover a tenth of their legal costs.

Note: This will be a variation, an alternate timeline if you will, of the drabble I wrote entitled 'The Trickster in Me'. I had it while I was walking around the electronics section of my local WalMart and saw the above movies/cartoons/TV show. Needless to say by the time I got home my muse was already tossing plot ideas about, pairing possibilities and a few funny scenes for chuckles. I'm half sorry to say that I'm a slave to my Muse and that's why I have difficult focusing my efforts on a few fan fiction crossovers at a time. If I try to work on something my muse isn't currently interested in it's like pulling teeth to get each page written. Since I believe I do my best work when she's interested and the words just flow like a river from my mind to my fingers to the MSWord document I let her decide what to focus on.

Note 2: In terms of timeline this occurs late season two in the BtVS, to the end of season two of Gargoyles in terms of Puck's memories and the events in the Angeline Jolie movie 'Maleficent' movie would happen between 1330 and 1344. As for Harry Potter this would start at the beginning of the summer prior to 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire'. This is going to a BtVS/Maleficent/Harry Potter merged universe where everything in these three properties happened in the same reality/universe.

Note 3: While I am willing to take plot ideas or funny scene ideas from you the readers whether or not I actually employ them in this fan fiction is entirely up to my own discretion. I will also consider pairing suggestions but you will have to give me more than 'I like this pairing' as a reason. Come up with a convincing argument as to why pairing Xan with this young woman would make the story interesting.

 _A Puck in Me is a Friend Indeed_

 _ **Xander POV**_

 _ **Business District, Sunnydale**_

 _Sometimes I think the Hellmouth is determined to sour everything it can,_ he thought as he walked to the new costume shop where he'd meet up with the rest of the Scoobies. _Here we have a perfectly quiet night where everything that goes bump in the night stays indoors and instead of being allowed to enjoy a night of movies and sweets we have to escort bratty kids around trick or treating._

While he'd like to think that the kids they'd be put in charge of would be reasonably behaved and do what they were told, he still remembered what it was like to be that age. At that age he'd been easily distracted, often following whatever caught his eye, often without any thought to the potential danger and just as often tried to push the limits of what he was permitted to do by adults in general. After all at that age everything you knew about the world was limited to your house, your yard, what you saw on television and the various places your parents took you. Since the majority of parents would never take their child anyplace dangerous, kids were ignorant of being seriously hurt or even killed by another person if they weren't careful. They thought that the worst thing that could happen to was a scolding or being grounded for a month. It never even entered their mind that if they weren't careful they could be permanently injured or killed.

Some children took this in stride.

Others took the belief that no adult would seriously punish them to do whatever they wanted.

As a result he fully expected that at least a handful of the children he'd be stuck with would mouth off and make a competition of seeing who could irritate him the most. While teenagers and adults could deal with irritation between one another without any real consequences, so long as they didn't take it too far, a teenager however could not vent irritation on a child any more than an adult could without legal consequences.

True legal consequences for such things in Sunnydale weren't as quick to be delivered or acted upon but he was fairly certain that while Tony Harris' actions could be ignored, his likely would not given the sort of luck he tended to experience. The best he could do would be to try and get into the spirit of things with a costume, try to have some fun by passing on his trick or treat wisdom and then regroup with the other Scoobies in order to salvage their original plans for the night.

Horror movies and bowls of candy to enjoy would have to wait until the kids went home and fell asleep.

Turning the corner it didn't take him long to spot the costume shop in question and, as he'd expected, standing in front of it was Buffy and Willow. From what he could see they certainly didn't look irritated so he took that to mean that they hadn't been waiting for long for him to arrive. He'd gotten held up a bit back at school speaking with the history teacher about a paper he'd handed in but fortunately, in the spirit of All Hallow's Eve, the man hadn't dragged it out too long.

It helped that Mister Thompson didn't care for Snyder any more than the students did so any opportunity to deny the principal the chance to deal out unfair punishment was to be taken.

"What took you so long?" Willow asked sounding only a little impatient to get things going.

"Mister Thompson wanted to make me sweat for as long as he could before letting me go," he replied, remembering that his teacher hadn't wanted word to get around that he was 'aiding the enemy' as Snyder would perceive it. "Plus without a car I had to hoof it the entire way here."

"Let's just go in and see if there's anything worth wearing," Buffy said with a huff of irritation before turning to head to the establishment's front door. "If we're lucky the costumes will be good enough that we can go to the Bronze without Cordelia verbally tearing us a new one."

Indeed that would truly be the lemon to top off the two hours of escorting a group of kids around: being read the fashion riot act within half a minute of entering the Bronze.

As a group of three they entered 'Ethan's Costume Shop' to see if they could find within the things they needed for a half decent costume. Once inside he looked about and he could tell that the place had a pretty decent collection of costumes and accessories, with each one being of good quality rather than the type you just knew weren't meant to last more than the night. Still, that didn't mean he could go for the costume he most wanted because, despite all his scrimping, saving and couch diving, not to mention bottle recycling, he only had thirty dollars to spend. At the moment his plan was just to buy some accessories and then head down to the army surplus store to get some old army fatigues to finish putting together a soldier costume. He might've lucked out and managed to find two ten dollar bills in the couch along with some change but it still wasn't enough to get a Spider-Man costume or a Superman costume.

The three of them split up since the costumes were divided both by age group as well as by gender all about the interior of the shop. Strolling along it didn't take him long to find a bin that looked like it was full of plastic weapons, like swords and guns. In fact he saw a gun sticking out of the top that looked just perfect for what he had in mind since it was life-size rather than some tiny, dinky thing that just had the shape of an assault rifle but nothing else. With a grin on his face he advanced but, just as he almost reached arm's length from the item, a small redheaded blur ran by the bin and took it away along with his costume idea.

"I found a gun mom! I found one!" the eight year old boy said as he reached his ladies suit wearing mother.

"You sure did, Matthew! Let's go pay the nice store owner," the mother said with a smile before walking with her son towards the cash register.

 _Well, there goes that plan._ He could barely able to keep his disappointment from completely showing on his face. _Question is: can I come up with a plan B?_

Casting his gaze he searched for a costume he could be content wearing that also wasn't beyond his current budget to obtain. He even entertained the idea of just getting a handful of accessories and mixing them with his own clothes at home in order to pretend to be an unmorphed Power Ranger or some other fictional character that was often seen in street clothes. Still, he'd prefer to wear something a little more impressive or he just knew that he'd get hit with insults directed at his poor financial situation.

Strolling along his hopes descended gradually as every costume that caught his interest proved to be outside his budget, often by a considerable amount. However it was when he spotted an odd looking red short sleeved shirt with blocky golden trim that a particularly loud mental ding went off in his head. Walking over to it he unhooked it from the rack in order to get a better look at it and was surprised when he recognized what show the outfit belonged to and who wore it: Puck from the Disney cartoon 'Gargoyles'.

He couldn't help but smile at the memories of watching it with Willow and, while the trickster didn't have all that many appearances outside of his Owen Burnett disguise, he was still hilarious. With Brent Spiner, aka Lieutenant Commander Data, voicing him the laughs were many indeed so seeing the costume before him in just the right size was like a sign from the divine. It had everything from the golden bracelets to the brown boots and he even spotted a bag with fake pointed ears that were more like Vulcan ears than the size they were in the cartoon. Still, he supposed that was for the best because what worked in animation didn't necessarily look all that good in real life. For one thing the costumes of the various X-Men might look cool on the comic book page but they'd look completely ridiculous if someone tried to fight the good fight in real life.

Reaching for the price tag on the costume, it looked like it wasn't divine intervention but rather the Hellmouth dangling a juicy bit of bait in front of his face only to yank it away at the last moment. The cost of getting the costume for the night was five dollars over what he had and he couldn't see a white wig on the outside or inside the shirt. Assuming that it didn't have one adding it to the overall bill would likely put him another seven to eight bucks over the already expensive costume.

In other words it looked like he would have to search elsewhere for inspiration for his costume.

"Is there something I can help you with, young man?" came a British voice from behind him that had him jumping almost a full foot off the ground in surprise.

"Don't DO that! Especially not in this town!" he exclaimed as he turned to face the source of the British voice to find a dark haired man in his mid-forties looking back at him.

"Dreadfully sorry. I only moved to Sunnydale to open this shop a few weeks ago." the Brit said, sounding politely sorry.

"No… no, I'm sorry. It's just that we've got a… PCP gang problem and getting surprised from behind is usually a bad thing," he said, not wanting to make the guy think he was weird or that he knew some sort of secret.

"I understand. Now is there something I can help you with? You seem to have found a costume that catches your fancy."

"Yeah, but it's a little too expensive for me, especially when it needs a wig to be perfect."

"Ah! The trickster Puck," the Brit said with a pleased smile on his face. "'A Midsummer's Night Dream' is one of my favorite Shakespearean plays."

He didn't have the heart to tell the guy that his love of the character came from a cartoon rather than a classic play.

"If the price is a problem for you then I'll chop it in half and throw the wig in for free."

"Wha-what!?" he exclaimed in shock at the sudden bit of luck.

"Well, I'm new to town and if I want to get any customers I need something to put my place ahead of 'Party Town'," the Brit exclaimed with a pleasant smile on his face. "I may lose some money doing this but if I can reel in some of 'Party Town's' regulars, it'll be worth it."

Made sense.

Whenever moving into a place with established rivals it only made sense to come up with some sort of plan for swiping your own slice of the market away from the others. Either a gimmick or a temporary price drop would certainly do the trick.

"Then you have a white wig somewhere around here?" he asked, deciding that Hellmouth paranoia was not justified in this situation. "It'll need to be long and stop just above my waist."

"Hmmmm… not out here but I believe there's one in the back. Why don't you take that costume to the register and I'll head out back to get the wig."

"Sounds like a plan to me. I'll see ya there."

With that they went their separate ways but he did so with satisfaction in his heart since he would be able to see himself dressed as one of the most fun characters in recent times.

This night was going to be fun after all.

 _ **Spike's Warehouse Lair**_

 _ **Spike's POV**_

"Here it comes," he said as he watched the recording play on the TVs hanging from the ceiling. "Rewind that. Let's see that again."

Waiting for the minion with the remote to do what he said his mind analyzed what he'd seen so far from every angle as he gradually began to familiarize himself with his prey's fighting style. So far she was proving to be an atypical Slayer, not like the two he'd offed over the last century, but he actually liked this fact. It'd make the hunt more interesting, less predictable, thus making the victory all the more satisfying when he bled her dry.

"You see that?" he asked after seeing the staking of his cannon fodder. "The way she stakes him with that thing? That's what's called resourceful. Rewind it again."

 _Definitely flexible mentally,_ he thought as he evaluated the blonde girl. _The first Slayer I fought was clueless when she couldn't find the wooden stake she'd brought to the fight. She wouldn't have thought about using something in the room with us as a substitute._

When he fought Summers next he would definitely need to case the area first and make sure anything that could be used as a weapon was removed. If he limited her to whatever she brought with her to the fight then it'd be that much easier to disarm her completely forcing things into a straight fistfight.

Perfect!

Walking around to another monitor he watched the staking once more and couldn't help but chuckle.

"She's tricky," he said with a grin as he came to a stop. "Baby likes to play."

He was about to ask for another rewind when he heard light footsteps to his right, causing him to turn his head in order to find out who was interrupting his strategy session. His mood softened a bit, as much as a Big Bad's ever did that is, when he saw that it was Dru with her usual 'not quite there' look.

"Miss Edith needs her tea." Dru said, swaying a bit to a tune only she could hear.

"C'mere, poodle," he said, holding out a hand to beckon her towards him.

"Do you love my insides? The parts you you can't see?" she asked as she took his hand.

"Eyeballs to entrails, my sweet," he replied as he pulled her close and held her in his arms. "That's why I've got to study this Slayer. Once I know her I can kill her. And once I kill her you can have your run of Sunnyhell. Get strong again."

Indeed he'd been in town long enough to know that, aside from the Slayer there was no one and nothing else that stood in his beloved's way. Oh, there were demons aplenty and probably a few mojo tossers but no one that'd have a problem with a vampire helping herself to the Happy Meals with legs. Even if they did have a problem, all it'd take was a messy object lesson to make them rethink getting in his way.

"Don't worry. Everything's switching," Dru said with a smile on her face. "Outside to inside… it makes her weak."

He tingled at the feel of her breath on his skin but what really had his attention was her prediction about the Slayer getting weak soon.

Never let it be said that he let opportunity pass him by when it presented itself.

"Really? Did my pet have a vision?" he asked, trying to coax the details out of her.

While he'd prefer to take a more forceful and direct approach, he knew he'd have more luck taking the gentler approach with his sire.

"Do you know what I miss? Leeches," she said, either not having heard his questions or choosing to ignore them.

"Come on, talk to Daddy," he said gently, using his hands to get her to look him in the eye. "This thing that makes the Slayer weak? When is it?"

"Tonight." Dru replied regaining her smile.

"Tonight's Halloween," he said, a little confused by this. "Nothing happens on Halloween."

"Someone's come to change it all. Someone new," Dru said as she began to sway in his arms like they were ballroom dancing, "The Slayer will dance round and round, the little tree will fly free of human limitations and the defender of man will…will…"

This was potentially problematic.

Drusilla's predictions were always a little broken up but they still flowed fairly smoothly when she chose to tell him what they were. It was when she had trouble getting it out, when she stalled, that it meant she either couldn't see past a certain point or what she saw was big enough to intimidate her. Considering the fact that she was more than a few sandwiches short of a picnic basket, it took something pretty impressive to intimidate her into speechlessness.

"What is it Dru? What's wrong?" he asked, growing worried as the seconds ticked by.

His words seemed to snap her out of it as her eyes snapped into focus then locked onto his with a look that made him take whatever was coming next seriously.

"The defender of man and the Puck will become as one!" Dru said with definite concern in her voice that was oddly lucid. "A spark… a spark could cast the darkness aside to replace it with a magical flame! Do not provoke Avalon's jester! To do so is to tempt the return of the raven's mistress!"

The Puck? Magical flame? Avalon's jester?

Some of what his love had said made sense since, when he was human, a classical education was a must and that included the revered works of William Shakespeare. So he knew who Puck was and the comment about Avalon's jester only made it that much more certain so if someone was going to get changed into Puck or someone like him, he'd need to keep his eyes open. Still, in almost all the stories Puck was portrayed as a trickster, with some of the early tales implying that he'd do you a favor if you did something for him first. If this was indeed the Puck he'd face tonight he'd laugh at the pranks, keep things civil and maybe help with the tricks if it led to the fairy bloke helping him kill the Slayer.

"Don't you worry your pretty little head, Dru," he said gently in an effort to calm her. "Me and Puck will be the best of friends tonight. No provoking at all. Promise!"

Seeing the sharpness leave her eyes and the concern faded away until she looked like she normally did at this time of day, they talked for a while longer but, once she left, he made a mental note to bring a few more of the boys along with him when he went out tonight. If things turned sour on him he'd use them as meat shields to take the hit for him while he made tracks for the nearest manhole cover to flee into the sewer system.

Unlike a lot of the wannabes he knew when to fight and when to flee to fight another day. That was why he was still standing when the others were dust in the wind.

He was a survivor. Period.

And so the night proceeded much as it had in many parallel realities but it would be the differences that would define how events would unfold for years to come.

One such difference was that instead of dressing up as a soldier, Alexander LaVelle Harris dressed as trickster known as Puck as portrayed in the Disney cartoon 'Gargoyles'. As a result of this the children who might have given him trouble instead looked with joy at the teenager dressed up as one of their beloved characters. They didn't cause him trouble and, since Xander was a bit of a trickster himself, he found it easy to emulate the funny personality that Brent Spiner used. As a result he made them laugh even as he passed on the tricks he'd learned over the years to maximize their candy take of the night.

It would be little differences both in Sunnydale and abroad that would set this reality apart from all the others.

'Showtime'.

Ethan Rayne had no clue as to how right he truly was.

Upon the final incantation of the spell Janus' power descended from its place on Roman Olympus down to the bust that was his representation. From there the energy stretched forth its tendrils seeking out all those that had been specially treated to receive so that the purpose of the spell could be fulfilled. One after another made contact with the unsuspecting victim, changing them from who they were to what they were pretending to be for the night. Cowboys, soldiers, princesses and superheroes went from being relatively inexpensive costumes to being as real as a bullet between the eyes or a punch in the face. For some the changes were merely cosmetic, such as a change of hair color or a shift in skin color, but for others the transformations were a great deal more dramatic.

Nails turned into talons.

Human tongues became forked tongues.

Wings tore through the backs of expensive red business suits even as a tail shredded a skirt and shoes suddenly became decidedly too small for the impressive three toed feet.

However for one it was exceedingly lucky that his mind was pushed to the metaphorical backseat so quickly because it was then that his body began to spin like a top, faster and faster, until blurring became the central theme. If Xander had remained in control for even five seconds nausea would've been a real issue.

Round and round you go, where it all ends no one knows.

Especially for those that had a touch of… destiny… floating about them.

 _ **Streets of Sunnydale**_

 _ **Child of Oberon Puck's POV**_

"Heeerrrreee's PUCK!" he said to kick off yet another of his small student's lessons in the use of his Sidhe powers.

Only when he finished his transformation from Owen Burnett to the form of his birth did he notice that he wasn't in young Alexander's room in Castle Wyvern but rather in the middle of a street lined with cars and houses. This was more than a little confusing since he didn't recall feeling someone summoning him and he definitely hadn't consciously teleported here.

For one thing the amount of demonic energy encompassing the town he now found himself in definitely would've gotten it crossed off his list of vacation spots.

"Ugh! What a dump!" he exclaimed with dissatisfaction as he rose up to hover comfortably a couple of feet off the ground, arms crossed over his chest. "The local tourist bureau has their work cut out for them getting anyone to come here voluntarily."

Looking about he noticed that the cars lining the sides of the road he was on had Californian license plates, bringing up one more mystery concerning his current predicament. While he was above average in terms of power where the Children of Oberon were concerned, teleporting clear to the other side of the country in one go without a magnifier was beyond his abilities. Even when he turned everyone in Manhattan into gargoyles he'd needed Titania's mirror plus the satellite dish atop the World Trade Center in order to succeed. He knew for a fact that nothing of the sort had been in young Alexander's room at the time he'd begun his transformation and, thanks to his memories as Owen Burnett, he knew the Xanatoses didn't have anything in the entire building either.

So how had he gotten here?

"Oh well! As long as I'm here I might as well see what people do for fun in a town like this," he said, deciding to leave his current dilemma to his subconscious to solve.

Flying into the air he ascended until he reached an altitude where he could see almost the entire town below him, making it that much easier to spot something interesting. The first thing he spotted was pretty hard to miss since it encompassed the entire town and was easily perceivable to his fae eyes. The demonic energy he'd felt upon arrival definitely covered the entire town but its uniform shape as well as the fact that it seemed to spring from a central point implied much about its nature. His first instinct had been to label the place a demon town with the combined energy of a sizeable population being responsible for the cloud that encompassed everything. However now that he had some altitude, he could see more than before and saw that the foul aura was being produced by a single point that spread out its energy over the entire town, then it was a bigger problem than he'd originally thought.

 _Something's a brewin'!_ he thought to himself as he wondered what he'd landed in this time. _Time to ask the cook what's on the menu._

While it'd be nice if this problem stayed on the west coast, he knew that whenever power of this scale gathered it rarely stayed put in one geographical spot. It was far more likely that once California fell neighboring states would fall to the demonic energy before the phenomena or the one responsible for it would head east. Given his mandate from Lord Oberon to protect Alexander Xanatos, he had two good reasons to nip this thing in the bud before it got any bigger. There was also the fact that demonic energy as well as the various uses for it could pose a threat to Xanatos Enterprises interests in the state of California. Thus he began to fly towards the center of the whirlpool of demonic energy, feeling that it was a pretty safe bet that the person responsible would be there or at least close by.

However just as he got within sight of the source, a SCHOOL of all things, something slammed into him from the side, catching him completely by surprise. He tried to wiggle free but whoever had tackled him was pretty strong and had a solid grip that he couldn't shake with physical strength alone. So with a thought he teleported himself out of his assailant's grasp and half a dozen feet to the left, using his magic to bring his descent to a stop. Turning towards his assailant he was surprised to find himself looking at a female gargoyle that was VERY familiar to him even without the crude golden accessories decorating her forehead and upper left arm.

"Now is that any way to say hello?" he asked with mock hurt in his voice.

"Why have you brought me here, Puck!?" Demona growled, eyes glowing blood red. "What game are you playing at?!"

"For your information, 'Dominique', I had nothing to do with this," he replied, referring to the fact that she'd obviously transformed while still wearing her CEO business suit. "If I was playing a game I definitely wouldn't have invited you. I'd have picked someone with a half decent sense of humor… like Detective Maza."

He couldn't help but chuckle as the gargess' rage rose to the point where he could spot a vein pulsing on the side of her head in time with her heartbeat. Predictably Demona immediately and aggressively tried to use the air currents to try make another grab for him but his flight was generated by his magic rather than the air around him, thus making it almost pathetically easy to evade her attempts. Still, tag could be a fun game and for a moment he was tempted to put his plan to investigate the source of the demonic energy on hold to see just how long Goliath's former mate would persist in her efforts to capture him. However he knew that he'd probably get in trouble with Big Daddy Oberon the longer he remained away from Manhattan so it was in his best interests to end things quickly.

"Now as much fun as it'd be to play tag with you all night, I think we both have things we'd rather be doing right now." He used his magic to trap the female gargoyle within a bubble of energy. "I might not be the reason we're here but I know a good place to start looking. Want to take a look?"

He could see the anger boiling within her and, like the routine that her life had become, he feared that she'd let this fury cloud her mind, causing mistakes to be made. Indeed anyone who knew the full history of the gargoyle that came to be called Demona knew that she was her own worst enemy and the source of her own tragic past. If she hadn't collaborated with Wyvern's captain of the guard but rather exposed him, her clan brothers and sisters would still be alive. If she hadn't let her misplaced hatred of humans cause her to permanently scar Gillecomgain then the Hunter line might never have been born. If her mistrust of MacBeth hadn't caused her to abandon him on the eve of their battle against Cannmore and his English allies, her new clan might not have been slaughtered. Over and over again her anger, her refusal, to take responsibility for her actions damned her to a path that would only bring tragedy into her life.

Things took a turn for the better, though, when in what was probably a calculated move Demona forced herself to calm down causing the crimson light to fade from her eyes.

"I will follow for now, Puck," Demona said, preparing her wings to catch herself when his bubble disappeared. "Know this: if this is another of your tricks I will find a way to make it your last."

 _Yeah, yeah!_ he thought while keeping his eye roll internal rather than external.

Without a word he resumed his flight towards the school where his mystic senses told him the demonic energy was coming from. The closer he got the more effort he had to put into using his magic to create a buffer around his body to ward off the unpleasant sensations being caused by the hellish energy but he managed just the same. Touching down on the ground outside what looked like the main entrance, he saw the sign proclaiming it to be 'Sunnydale High School', confirming his earlier label. He glanced about the exterior looking for the usual symbols and writing but was disappointed to find nothing of note.

"Well, this is disappointing," he remarked as he levitated towards the doors. "Doesn't this guy know that demonic ceremonies need a certain ambiance? Where are the torches? The smoking braziers?! I should write an angry letter for this!"

"Spare me your nonsense," Demona said with a sound indicating she'd caped her winds about her shoulders. "Lead me to the human responsible for this mess so I can 'persuade' him to send me home."

 _Not a single funny bone in her ENTIRE body!_ This time letting his eyes roll externally since he wasn't facing the female gargoyle.

Pushing the door open he coasted through the air, taking in everything around him while at the same time tracing the demonic energy back to its ground zero. The more he saw, the more he began to wonder if the epicenter of the energy really was being utilized or if he'd guessed the cause of their relocation wrong. Still, it was better to be safe than sorry and, if he was wrong, then at least these confined hallways would give him a way to escape Demona and gain some lead time.

It was two minutes before he tracked the source of the emanations to the school library or, more precisely, to a spot beneath the library but, since there weren't any stairs leading down, it'd be close enough. It was when he pushed the double doors of the library to the side that he spied the first living soul he'd seen since setting foot on the premises.

"You wouldn't happen to have a copy of the Scrolls of Merlin here, would ya?" he asked casually as though he was here to borrow something rather than get answers.

He laughed as he watched the mid-forties man with glasses get startled enough to toss the cards that'd been in his hands into the air. However, when the man stepped back from the doors in fear, he knew Demona had entered the room and decided to get his answers before the man fainted out of fright.

"Now, now, I know I'm unnaturally handsome but that's no reason to be intimidated," he said in a disarming tone of voice with a bit of humor. "Allow me to introduce myself! My name is Puck, trickster and Child of Oberon, and this is my 'lovely' companion for the night Demona. And you would be?"

"R-Rupert Giles," 'Rupert' replied with a British accent that just screamed upper crust of society.

"Well, Ruppie, here's the situation: up until a little while ago me and Demona were minding our own businesses when out of nowhere we blinked and found ourselves here." He flew over to the man and putting a 'pal arm' around the Brit's shoulder, "Now, while I'm sure this is a swell town and all, the two of us have jobs back home that need doing. I don't suppose you'd know what brought us here, do you?"

"W-what makes you t-think I know anything?" Rupert asked, doing a good job of feigning ignorance of all things paranormal but Lexington would grow an afro before he failed to see through such things.

"Well, it could be the enchanted books you have on the shelves or the archaic weapons concealed but mostly it's the mark on your forearm," he replied, pointing at each piece of evidence in turn. "So… any ideas?"

"Well, um, it's difficult to say. Halloween is supposed to be relatively quiet concerning demonic and arcane matters," Rupert replied, finally giving up his charade.

"Halloween?" he asked rhetorically as he recalled some of the things he'd seen while he'd hovered over the town. "That would certain explain the abundance of pumpkins."

"Indeed. Did you notice anything amiss? Anything that seemed odd?" Rupert asked, sounding much more considering of the information he was being given.

"Nothing I didn't already know about you weak humans," Demona replied, making her loathing of humans clear. "I saw many of them running like fools from monsters and strange costumed beings."

"Same here," he said as he reviewed his own memories. "I almost thought that there was a cosplay convention but a lot of them could do the same stuff as in the TV shows."

"A lot of them? Not all of them?" Rupert asked, sounding as though he may have a lead for them.

"Nope. A couple of them were just normal people in costumes."

"Then that is our lead. If I am right then someone or something has transformed those clad in Halloween costumes INTO their costumes. Those dressed as knights become true knights," Rupert said latching onto his theory with strong certainty, "and those dressed as costumed heroes gain the attributes of that hero and perhaps their powers. If we can determine a common thread linking those transformed, we can find the source of the spell."

"I fail to see how putting an end to some sorcerer's spell will help return me to where I belong." Demona said, clearly growing impatient for results. "Unless you have something more promising I will resume searching for answers on my own."

"If my theory is correct your search will be in vain," Rupert said, remaining calm and rational. "The name 'Puck' is well known as a fictional character from a play. Associates of mine have looked into the matter and thoroughly concluded that no such being exists. Add to that the fact that your appearance does not match any known supernatural species that I am aware of and I can draw only one conclusion. This is not your native reality."

He suspected that old Ruppie was just humoring them by making it sound as though he thought they were merely displaced from their reality rather than figments of someone's imagination given substance. This was a wise course of action because, while he personally didn't care all that much, Demona would not react well to being told she was the product of some human's imagination.

"It is far more likely that due to a combination of costume components and accessories someone managed to dress as each of you, causing the spell to pull your mind from your native world and place it in the wearer's body. It is also likely that their bodies were reshaped to best match your native forms," Rupert said, continuing to outline his theory. "If we locate the source of the spell as well as the caster we can reverse the spell returning both of you to your native realities."

"Then let us find the filthy human responsible and end this foolishness." Demona said, clearly not wanting to remain longer than absolutely necessary.

With that she strode back out the library doors, leaving just him and Rupert.

"Don't take it personally," he said with a bit of exasperation. "She's not exactly a people person."

"Quite," Rupert said with undertones that clearly meant 'that is an understatement'.

 _ **Streets of Sunnydale**_

 _ **Rupert Giles' POV**_

 _This is proving to be anything but a quiet night,_ he thought even as he followed Puck as the enspelled person flitted through the air.

Never in his darkest nightmares did he perceive Halloween turning out to be so… chaotic, but at least the actual demons and vampires seemed to be adhering to the norm for this night. While he had seen plenty of fictional vampires and demons running about, it hadn't taken much more than a bolt of emerald energy from Puck to scare them off. Of course that happened when the Child of Oberon was too distracted trying to track down the source of the costume spell to bother with anything more elaborate.

The few times that they were accosted strongly enough to break through that distracted state though… he personally prayed that Puck and Xander never met or else he would never get any peace.

"Soooo… what's up with the stink hole under your library?" Puck asked casually as he flitted this way and that through the air like a dog trying to follow a scent. "Those fumes're dangerous, you know."

"The 'stink hole' you are referring to is a Hellmouth. A weak point between this dimension and a dimension that matches the description of Hell quite nicely," he replied even as he did his best to remain alert for danger. "It is not so weak that demons can come through but the energy… smell of Hell… pours out and attracts all who could benefit from it. We are fortunate that those creatures have chosen to remain in their lairs tonight or matters could be a great deal worse."

"They stay in? Must think All Hallow's Eve's gotten too commercial," Puck said offhand and looked to be about to say something more when a commotion to their right caught both their attentions.

Looking he could see a young woman in an extravagant ballroom dress and stylized dark brown hair run through an intersection as fast as she could, all the while screaming in fear at the top of her lungs. This was troubling enough but when he saw what was chasing her, the concern he felt tripled for it was a group of creatures led by one who matched the description of William the Bloody. He had never seen the infamous vampire but the leather coat and platinum blonde hair made his identification quite likely.

He was not foolish.

He knew that people had been hurt and perhaps had even died since the spell had been activated. He knew that the best way to minimize casualties would be to focus on finding the focal point of the spell and ending it… but could he ignore someone obviously in danger of being killed by Spike?

No.

No, he could not.

Reaching into his pockets, he took hold of the bottles of holy water that he always carried with him before running towards the group of fiends with a plan in mind. It wasn't much of a plan but there was a logic to it so he'd follow through with it and hope for the best. The moment he got the right distance he brought his arm like a professional pitcher before throwing half the small bottles he had with him in Spike's direction. As he'd hoped the murderous undead man simply mistook his rapid approach for another terrified civilian and did not react quickly to his approach. This allowed his throw to land precisely on target, smashing the glass on the side of Spike's head, causing the killer of two Slayers to cry out in pain as the liquid burned his skin. Some of the holy water splashed on a few other members of the mob but only half of them reacted to it, implying that either they were a breed of demon that was immune to it or they were transformed humans.

In any case it was time to rub some salt in the wounds.

"Why don't you try chasing someone stronger, you bloody poofter!" he yelled in the most disrespectful tone of voice he could manage. "Bet you can't catch me, ya minger!"

With that he turned around and began to run as though his life depended it… which it did, of course… hoping that he would be able to lose his pursuers in the maze of streets that was Sunnydale. With luck Spike was the only vampire or demon out and about so the young woman he'd saved would have a better chance of surviving the night. Once he'd successfully escaped he would resume searching for the origin of the spell with or without any aid from either Puck or Demona. The two transformed trick or treaters might even manage to find the focal point of the spell before he even finished losing Spike.

Until he determined otherwise he would focus on running and losing the monsters nipping at his heels.

"WWWOOOOOOO!" came an unearthly howl from above that stopped him in his tracks.

Looking up he could only watch as Demona, wings spread and eyes lit up bright red, swooped down from the air to tackle Spike and his entire group to the ground. Whether it was due to her sheer strength, momentum or the element of surprise he didn't know but it did save him from finding out the hard way just how long he could retain a sprinting pace.

Still, the question remained why had Demona come to his aid.

"Foolish human!" Demon growled as she stood ferociously before a recovering Spike. "I will not allow you to throw your life away until you've sent me home! We will deal with this trash and then we will end this spell! Understand!?"

"Quite," he replied immediately, more than a bit intimidated at the sight of her sharp teeth, claws and extended wings.

"What kind of demon are you?" Spike asked, sounding bewildered by the gargoyle likely because he'd never encountered one before.

No one had outside of the stone variety that decorated so many gothic buildings.

"The kind that will be your END!" Demona replied before lunging forward, hands shooting forward with fingers curled in order to tear apart undead flesh.

It was likely only decades of honed survival instinct that allowed Spike to dodge backwards to avoid a horizontal slash that would have torn his stomach open. Instead it merely tore a chunk out of the vampire's red shirt while also damaging the black leather trench coat that hung on his shoulders, exposing pale unharmed undead flesh.

"OI! NO ONE touches the COAT!" Spike exclaimed in rage as his demon came forth, causing his forehead to bulge, his eyes to turn a demonic yellow and his fangs to become more pronounced. "Time to show you why they call me William the Bloody!"

The vampire charged the female, leading to a battle that caused him to feel equal parts awe and fear. With every second that passed he was witness to the reason why Spike had been able to slay two Slayers and why only a fool would enter into battle with a gargoyle unprepared. A right hook from Spike, ducked under. A vicious vertical slash from the left hand, sidestepped. Next came an unexpected swing of a wing successfully impacting, cutting two parallel bloody lines across the cheek of Spike. A strong punch to the stomach thrown by William the Bloody caused Demona to bend over slightly before she delivered one of her own. Unlike Spike's gut punch, though, the one delivered by the gargess succeeded in taking the vampire clean off his feet as well as back a half dozen feet.

"Ge-get HER!" Spike coughed and yelled out between attempts to recover from the thunderous blow.

 _Not good!_ he thought as his mind began quickly seeking a way to end this fight. _While some of Spike's horde might be genuine demons and vampires, the possibility is high that some of them are transformed trick or treaters! I can't let Demona kill them!_

"Creatures and beasties oh so mean, charging forth to cause a scene!" came Puck's chanting voice from the sky above. "Thou art truly foul and quite unclean, thus I bind your bodies with chains UNSEEN!"

With the final word a flash of emerald light lit up the sky and then, one by one, the horde that had been advancing on Demona fell to the ground as though each had been thoroughly wrapped in chains. No matter how strong or how large the creatures were their efforts to free themselves were proving themselves to be pointless. The magic of Puck's spell wasn't something that could be overcome with physical strength alone. It would take magic or something known to negate fae magic to free them now and he prayed that neither was present at the moment.

"Puck!" Demona growled, clearly not happy at having her fight interrupted.

"As fun as it'd be to see the rest of your clothes get torn off fighting these creatures, I really MUST get back to Alex at the Eyrie building," Puck said, floating down until he was hovering a little above the ground. "The boy's an absolute mess without his hockey Puck around!"

This got a growl that reminded him a lot of a mountain lion's but instead of attempting to attack Puck she visibly reigned in her anger before caping her wings about her shoulders.

"Very well," Demona said reluctantly before locking eyes on an immobilized Spike. "But first…"

Walking over to the platinum blonde vampire, a malicious smile blossomed over the female gargoyle's face.

"Now IF I remember CORRECTLY… a vampire can be killed by piercing its heart with a sharp piece of wood OR decapitation." Demona said with malicious casualness. "Shall we see if that is true?"

"NNOOO-!" Spike cried out before Demona's three-toed foot stomped down on the master vampire's head, crushing it and spider-webbing the street beneath it.

Not the cleanest vampire kill he'd ever witnessed but he watched William the Bloody turn into a pile of ash, coat and all, putting end to the murderous unlife once and for all.

 _At least something positive has come of this night,_ he thought even as his unlikely group came together once more. _Now to end it._

With that they continued in the direction they'd been going in before the helpless young woman had attracted his attention.

 _ **Outside Ethan's Costume Shop**_

 _ **Child of Oberon Puck's POV**_

"This is it," he said looking at the storefront he'd traced the spell to. "Not the most impressive of places is it?"

"I believe that that is the point, Puck," Rupert said, standing in front of a store that had 'Ethan's Costume Shop' hanging over the front entrance. "If the person I am thinking of is behind this entire fiasco, he would not want his location to be found out."

"Does this human have a name?" Demona asked, speaking the word 'human' like it left a bad taste in her mouth.

"Ethan Rayne. I knew him when I was younger and he always loved to sow chaos wherever he went." Rupert replied with a flicker of fury not much different from Demona's in his eyes. "Sow chaos and not care who got hurt in the process. After one particularly… harrowing event we parted company and never saw each other again. Until now."

"Tch! Nothing worse than a sloppy trickster!" he said with a scowl as he flew about the front of the store looking for anything to be concerned about. "I learned to clean up after myself two centuries after I started my illustrious career as a trickster."

"That's debatable!" Demona said as she too looked for signs of wards, traps and talismans.

"You're still not sore about turning to human during the day are you?" he asked, turning to look at the female gargoyle. "I thought you were warming up to being 'Dominique Destine'."

"You know full well what I wanted!" Demona growled, her eyes flashing crimson for a moment. "To remain flesh! To remain a gargoyle even under the light of the sun! Not become one of… THEM!"

"But that would've been so BORING!" he said, rolling his eyes as he casually flew circles around the angry redhead. "Turning you into a human was SO much more fun to watch!"

Seeing the female gargoyle tensing in preparation to attack, he figured he'd best lay off since they had more important things to do. He hadn't been lying when he'd said that Alex Xanatos was quite fond of him and would raise a serious commotion at his absence. While the kid might not be old enough, as far as his own body was concerned, to speak, they'd talked a lot the few times Lexington had agreed to loan his body out for lessons. It'd taken a cutting edge laptop and access to one of the electronics labs in the Eyrie Building to get the small gargoyle to agree but it'd all worked out in the end. The little man definitely considered him family and listened to his every word during their lessons together.

It also worried him that Oberon might tighten the restrictions on his power even further if he didn't return to his native reality as soon as possible.

It was hard enough already to find opportunities to slip out of his Owen Burnett personae and into something that was a lot more HIM.

Finishing his survey of the building's exterior, he could see a few protection spells present along with a ward that the wannabes referred to as an 'SEP' spell, Someone Else's Problem. As far as mortals went it wasn't too bad but for a Child of Oberon it was at the same equivalent level as an elementary school project.

"It's so pathetic it's not even worth a song, spells and wards please be gone."

With a flick of his fingers a bolt of energy carried the spell across the gap, impacting the targeted spells and ward shattering both after a few moment's resistance. There was some risk to combatting mortal sorcery with fae magic since it occasionally led to a rather explosive reaction but, given the amounts being used on both sides, he'd felt safe enough in casting a spell. Besides, it wasn't like Demona or Rupert were carrying the necessary ingredients to undo the obstructions themselves so that only left him.

Watching as pieces of blue and golden glass faded from sight, he knew that Ethan Rayne likely knew he was about to receive guests so there was no point to subtlety anymore.

In which case…

"Dear Demona, would you care to knock? It's only polite after all." he said with a bow and a gesture.

"Indeed," Demona said before walking up to the entrance to the store.

Much as he'd expected the female gargoyle kicked the door down with one blow, shattering the glass window and warping the metal frame before it hit the ground.

Glancing at Rupert, he could tell that the man would've preferred a quieter way of getting inside but what was done was done so they entered the costume shop to find the entire place dark, with only moonlight to let them see what was around them. He and Demona had less trouble than Mister Giles due to their nonhuman nature but their eyes couldn't quite pierce the darkness entirely. Fortunately there was a light coming from a curtained off back room that just screamed 'come take a look at what's inside'.

Far be it for him to pass up an invitation like that!

Flying over to the curtain he grabbed one side and pulled, saying, "Come out, come out wherever you-!"

He didn't get to say more because, faster than his eyes could follow, something hit him and wrapped itself around his body. As he felt the burning sensation when the object made contact with his skin and the weakening of his magic he knew what he'd been hit with.

Iron.

After he hit the ground and recovered enough he looked down to see a metal wire net wrapped around his torso, pinning his arms to his body quite snugly. It was worse than when Demona had summoned him! At least there'd been a bit of slack to the chains she'd used, allowing him to keep a piece of cloth between the metal and his skin.

No such luck here.

"Dreadfully sorry, Puck," came a British voice from the back room as a hand parted the curtain. "From one trickster to another I honestly admire your work but even you have to admit it would have been a tad lopsided if you were given free reign."

It was then that a man with dark hair and an age similar to Rupert emerged clad in a robe that was various shades of red entered the main area of the shop. Bandages were wrapped around his hands and what looked to be some sort of net launcher rested in a relaxed position in his right hand, clearly having fired its payload. The expression on the man's face was playful but wary as though he knew it'd be foolish to completely let his guard down.

Smart.

"Hello, Ethan," Rupert said with a chill colder than any blizzard Odin could muster even with home field advantage.

"Hello, Ripper." Ethan said with a cocky smile on his face and amusement in his eyes.

"Let me guess: glee club members?" he asked, not sounding serious in the least.

"Hardly," Ethan replied, never taking his eyes off Rupert. "Ripper and I used to run together with some friends, having a grand old time. Then, after one little screw up, my good friend bailed."

"It was hardly 'a little screw up', Ethan. Randall died." Rupert's eyes narrowed with elevated anger. "Still, I should've known this was all your doing. This Halloween stunt stinks of Ethan Rayne."

"Yes, it does, doesn't it?" Ethan asked rhetorically with a victorious smile on his face. "Don't wish to blow my own trumpet, but it's genius. The very embodiment of 'be careful what you wish for'."

"Enough of this!" Demona declared as she sprang across the gap between her and Ethan, grabbing the man by the front of the robe before lifting him off the ground. "End this spell, mage. NOW."

"What's in it for me?" Ethan asked, still possessing enough bravado to smile smugly.

"A swift death as opposed to a long, excruciating one." Demona replied with a tooth-filled smile that promised gleefully inflicted pain for the man she was directing it at.

He almost chuckled at the faltering confidence on the man's face but it wasn't completely gone since Ethan chose to cling to something in desperation.

"If you kill me you won't be able to shut down the spell," Ethan said, implying that only he held the necessary information.

"I am no stranger to magic, human," Demona said, never losing her smile for an instant, but rather adding glowing crimson eyes to the mix. "I have a millennia of experience studying every form of sorcery, both human and fae. I think I can determine the solution without you."

As if to emphasize how dangerous of a situation the man was in, the immortal gargoyle brought up her other hand, bringing its sharp talons closer and closer to Ethan's face. Closer and closer the deadly implements came until finally the mage's hollow confidence fell away to reveal true fear on his face.

"The bust! The clay bust of Janus!" Ethan exclaimed, fear clear in his voice. "Destroy it and the spell will end!"

"There… now was that so hard?" Demona asked with a look that actually looked somewhat soft for a moment.

It'd happened fast, too fast for anyone to stop, including him, but he had the same look on his face as Rupert Giles did: unrestrained shock.

With one swift thrust Demona had run Ethan Rayne through with her taloned hand and now the only thing keeping Rayne from dropping to the ground was the fact that he was impaled on her arm. Blood coated the part of her arm that currently stuck out of the man's back and, while it was tough to see, he was pretty sure the blood was flowing just as freely from the chest. Still, the mortally wounded man still had enough life in him to look down at it in shock before raising his gaze to meet Demona's, as if to ask 'why'.

Then he died.

"Why… why did you do that?" Rupert asked mysteriously, sounding a little sad at the death of his 'old friend'.

"He'd outlived his usefulness," Demona replied without a single sign of remorse. "This is punishment for presuming that he could use me for his own personal entertainment. It was quicker than he deserved."

She threw the lifeless body away, sending it across the room to impact a rack of clothes, causing both to crash to the ground in a mess. Striding towards the curtain she ripped one half of it off before beginning to wipe off the blood with strong long wipes, tossing it to the side a minute later. Rupert took off for the back room a moment later, though whether it was to help end the spell or verbally tear into Demona for her unnecessarily lethal action he didn't know. If it wasn't for the iron wire net wrapped around him he'd be heading for the back room as well but, since that wasn't the case, he could only sit up and even that was painful with the metal pressing against his skin.

Carefully he listened so that he would be able to hear everything that was said but all that reached his ears was the loud crash of shattering stone.

Then thinking became impossible as all his senses and his mind became overwhelmed by a force unlike anything he'd experienced in his life before a dark curtain fell over his consciousness.

It wasn't funny at all.

 _ **Inside Ethan's Costume Shop**_

 _ **Xander's POV**_

 _W-why does this stuff a-always happen to me?_ he thought as he pushed himself onto his elbows.

He winced slightly as pain akin to a serious case of rug burn danced up and down his arms but he'd dealt with worse over the course of his life so he soldiered on through it. Looking about, he could see bits of what might have been a wire net scattered about him but that didn't make much sense even when taking into account the weirdness that was the Hellmouth. With a few more wincing movements he managed to fully sit up and look about to find out where he was because, between when he'd blacked out and now, he only had bits and pieces of sensory input to fill in the blanks. Those bits and pieces though didn't make sense since they had him FLYING of all things and, unless he was mistaken, doing magic. Neither was something he was capable of, this he knew better than anyone, so he dismissed the fragments as nonsense.

"AAAHHHH!" came a cry that was all too familiar from the back room of what he'd come to recognize was the shop where he'd gotten his Puck costume.

"Willow!" he exclaimed before he forced himself to his unsteady feet and made his way for the back room as quickly as he could.

It wasn't a graceful dash by any measure but he made it there just the same, though nothing could have prepared him for what he found upon entering the back room. Kneeling on the floor was a teenage female gargoyle with many of the physical characteristics of Demona, but her face was decidedly different since it belonged to his oldest and most treasured friend. However it was the look of utter trauma on her face as she stared down at her lightly blood-coated gargoyle arm that took priority for him. He knew Willow, knew her mind almost as well as he knew his own, so he knew that her mental state was an absolute mess as she tried to comprehend what was going on. Without a moment's hesitation he went to her side and wrapped his arms around her in a comforting hug, resisting her reflexive efforts to shake him off.

"I'm here Willow!" he said like a brother would to comfort a sister. "I'm here!"

Over and over he said this in an effort to bring her out of her emotional maelstrom but it was a good two minutes before he sensed even a little of her distress fade away but it was enough to get her talking.

"Xan… Xander? What's happened to me?" Willow asked with her emotional state written in broad strokes across her face.

Thinking back, he tried to figure out how Willow had suddenly become a mini-Demona and, fortunately, his memory came up with the answer. In a move that'd surprised him greatly, Willow had come down the stairs at Buffy's house wearing a smart red business suit with her hair done in a tasteful ponytail in the back. When he'd asked her who she was pretending to be she'd replied that she was the C.E.O. of a major multi-national corporation. While he didn't know how that connected to Dominique Destine, C.E.O. of Nightstone Unlimited, he could only presume that similar hair color mixed with the usual Hellmouth luck had something to do with it.

He certainly hoped that Janus hadn't decided to do this because of his friendship with Willow because, regardless of rational thought, he would feel a little responsible for her present circumstances.

"Do you want the honest answer or the reassuring one?" he asked, figuring he'd give her control of how things went.

"H-honest one," she replied, looking at him with trusting eyes.

"I think someone did some mojo to turn us into our costumes," he said since it meshed with the fragments and his own deductive reasoning ability. "Not sure how but somehow the spell thought you'd dressed as Dominique Destine… Demona."

He could see when the names he'd provided connected with Willow's own memories of the Disney cartoon because she looked back down at her hands as well as the tattered remains of the business suit. A thought occurred to him that had him determined to keep her distracted for as long as possible so he grabbed her head and forced her to look him in the eyes.

"Chill, Willow! Chill! We'll get this fixed in no time!" he said before using his lopsided smile to reassure her further. "We'll do all night research sessions for the entire week, the entire MONTH if necessary, until we find a way to get you back to normal. Giles is an arcane encyclopedia with legs and he has the Watcher's Council to call on. Everything'll be fine!"

"Quite right, Xander," came a British voice from far end of the back room.

Both he and Willow turned to the voice to see that Giles was present as well and looked as though he'd been tossed to his current position rather than having moved there himself. Still, it made sense that the Watcher was here since it was likely G-Man who tracked the spell here and put an end to it. If Giles learned enough about the spell to track it to the costume shop then that raised the odds of him knowing enough to reverse the changes done to Willow.

"I swear to you, Willow, I will exhaust every resource I possess to find a means to undo the changes made to your body," Giles said as he got to his feet. "For now, though, I believe it would be best if we distanced ourselves from this shop. While I am skeptical about the authorities coming to investigate the shop, I cannot rule it out entirely."

"Yeah. There's first time for everything," he said even as he helped his best bud to her now three-toed feet. "Time to beat feet, Willow."

Willow only nodded in response as they made for the back door to the costume shop, stumbling a few times since it wasn't easy going from walking flat footed on a five toed foot to walking on the balls of a three toed foot. Add to that the imbalance caused by the addition of wings and a tail… to say that it took them awhile to get back to the library unseen would not be an exaggeration. Still, they managed but it was not without feeling down

They'd gone out from the school with a group full of elementary school children.

Now they were returning without them and they had no idea where the kids were or even if they were still alive. Sure, many of them went as heroes or at least people capable of defending themselves but others went as monsters or noncombatants who knew nothing of fighting. He prayed that nothing serious happened to any of them, that Giles was right about the real demons staying in tonight, and that they'd all return safely home to their parents.

If even one of them died before the spell had been ended… it'd be one more thing to hate the Hellmouth for along with the guy that was behind the spell.

"Now I'll need to research both chaos magic and Roman spells," Giles said as he immediately began to go to the bookshelves taking what he needed as he went. "While I do not have a great deal on the former, I do have quite a bit on the latter so I should be able to get a grasp of what direction we should direct our efforts in."

"So no quick cures by morning?" he asked, hoping that it would be that easy.

"No. What I recall of chaos magic makes it clear that it is an unstable and unpredictable discipline that most avoid since it usually doesn't provide the desired results. Therefore it stands to reason that coming up with a means of countering such magic will be equally difficult," Giles replied as he finished making his rounds of the bookshelves. "It'd be like trying to catch a drunken hummingbird with your weaker arm. Difficult and time consuming but not impossible."

"Then here's hoping you've got some extra strength pain killers in your office," he said, looking to Willow with concern.

"What do you mean?" Giles asked, looking away from his books.

"I know what he means," Willow replied with dread in her tone. "He means that when the sun rises I'll be in a lot of pain and will need those pain killers."

"What? I do not understand." Giles said, looking at him with a puzzled look on his face.

"She got transformed into Demona's human personae Dominique Destine. Demona was born a female gargoyle and for most of her life that meant turning to stone at sunrise," he explained even as his mind produced images of what might happen. "Then she made the mistake of messing with Puck. She asked him to make it so that she would no longer turn to stone at sunrise but he was peeved so he gave her what she wanted with a twist. Instead of remaining her usual gargoyle self during the day, she gets transformed into a human."

"But how does that-?" Giles asked as he seemed to get a hint of the reason behind his concern.

"It always looked pretty painful in the cartoon," he replied with a serious look. "Bend over and drop to your knees painful."

"Good lord!" Giles declared with the justified level of concern. "Well, I do have a fully stocked First Aid kit as well as a few potent painkillers. Given Buffy's prodigious recuperative abilities she would shake off conventional over the counter painkillers fairly quickly. If we are mindful of the dosage they should suffice."

He didn't mention that he was concerned about whether or not Willow might be seriously injured as a result of the transformation. From what he'd seen in the cartoon the pain that Demona experienced was due to the shifting of organs and the merging of flesh since he figured that body of a gargoyle was different than that of a human both on the inside as well as on the outside. He'd always believed that the only thing that allowed Demona to survive such a process every sunrise and sunset was the immortality bond she had with MacBeth. The magic that bound those two together kept either of them from dying at anyone else's hands other than each other's, healing damage cause by anyone else.

Willow didn't have an immortality bond with anyone.

 _If Willow's hurt or… killed by the transformation…_ he thought as a murderous look covered his face for a moment. _…I'll bring the guy responsible back from the dead just to kill him all over again. SLOWLY._

Then as quickly as it'd appeared the lethal look vanished to be replaced with his usual slacker casualness.

 _ **Sunnydale High School Library**_

 _ **Willow's POV**_

 _This is SO weird,_ she thought as she tried to figure out how to sit comfortably on a chair with three new appendages getting in the way.

She knew she should be freaking out at her change in species as well as what'd likely happen at sunrise but whether it was shock or her learning to orient her mind, she was treating it all as just another assignment to be researched then passed in on time. Like Xander she'd watched the 'Gargoyles' cartoon both because it was fun and because it allowed her to spend time with the teenage guy she had a crush on. She hadn't chosen the ladies business suit with the idea to pretend to be Demona, if she'd wanted a costume to match up with Xander's she would've chosen Fox or Elisa Maza, but she was beginning to understand that nothing went as planned on a Hellmouth.

It took what seemed like five minutes but she finally managed to manipulate her extra limbs and her posture so that she could sit in relative comfort. It still felt unreal for the sensation of touch that she remembered to not match what her brain was telling her now since it expanded from her back as well as from below her waist. She could FEEL the air on her wings. She could FEEL her tail unconsciously swaying back and forth behind her. They were such alien sensations that they were throwing her mentally whether she wanted them to or not.

She just hoped that she wouldn't have to deal with it for very long.

Footsteps.

She could hear footsteps quickly approaching the doors to the library and she realized that before tonight they would've sounded more muffled. Instead the sound was coming through loud and clear along with the quick breathing of the person approaching the headquarters of the Scooby gang. Only a few seconds later did they open wide to reveal Buffy, who looked like someone had tied her to the back of a dirt bike before touring the forest outside Sunnydale. The dress was dirty, the wig was in complete disarray and stains tarnished both cloth as well as skin. She couldn't see any cuts or injuries though so it wasn't too bad but it still made clear that the Slayer had experienced a rough night.

"Giles you'll never believe the night-" Buffy said before her expression changed. "DEMON!"

In the blink of an eye the Slayer had an improvised weapon in hand and was coming straight at her with lethal intent in her eyes.

 _She doesn't recognize me!_ she thought with fear as she realized what could happen in the next few seconds.

It was then that instinct took over where conscious thought came up short as she rose to her feet, her wings flaring out as though to make herself appear bigger. It was only when Buffy executed a thrust with the tip of the flag pole she'd grabbed that her body ducked under it only to execute a sweep with her tail. It did its job by sending the blonde Slayer to the ground but, with the skill of her Calling, Buffy managed a backwards roll to regain her footing. Hands clenched into fists it was clear her friend would continue the assault even though she'd lost the flag pole in the leg sweep. In her case, though, the flare of instinct was beginning to withdraw and conscious thought was coming back, leaving her wondering what she should do.

"BUFFY STOP!" Xander yelled as he rushed from the bookshelves where he'd been helping Giles. "THAT'S WILLOW!"

This pierced through the Slayer's battle mode, causing her to stop mid-dash before looking at Xander and then Giles as though to confirm with them that she'd heard correctly. When Buffy received affirmative nods from both guys, the blonde looked at her, REALLY looked, and then the last of her battle readiness bled out, leaving only confusion and bafflement behind.

"Willow?" Buffy asked, obviously looking for verbal confirmation of what she was being told.

"Y-yeah…it's me…" she said as her wings settled with her emotional state. "…please no slaying."

"And I thought I had it bad!" Buffy exclaimed as she pulled off the wig that'd, up until then, had only stayed on her head due to metal clips.

She couldn't help but feel a little down at that statement because she had to agree that being turned into some noblewoman was definitely better than being turned into a genocide obsessed gargoyle.

"Way to raise the mood!" Xander said with a moderate amount of annoyance in his voice.

"Sorry," Buffy said, sounding genuinely remorseful for her insensitive remark. "I'm assuming Giles is going to be able to fix this?"

"I will do my best but I will need more than one night to gain an understanding of what needs to be done," Giles replied even as he began to go through one of the books he'd selected. "Did you gain any lingering side effects after the conclusion of the spell?"

"Not really," Buffy replied after a moment's thought. "I mean I can still remember a lot of the stuff Lady Useless did but it doesn't feel like it'll stick around for very long."

"Lady Useless?" Xander asked, sounding curious and amused about the name.

"The noblewoman I turned into… wasn't what I thought she'd be like," Buffy replied, looking both awkward and embarrassed. "Lots of screaming. Lots of running. No sophistication."

She couldn't help but smile at the image that produced in her mind.

Even if she had done her best to help Buffy choose the perfect costume so that she could impress Angel, it amused her to find out how it'd backfired. She didn't show this on her face but she had no doubt that Giles could see the twinkle of amusement in her eyes but, like her, he didn't let Buffy in on the truth.

Of course Xander didn't quite conceal his own amusement, earning him a glare from Buffy.

"Are you going to keep wearing your costume all night Xander?" Buffy said with irritation as she strode over to the young man. "At least take the wig and ears off."

In a move to help him the Slayer reached out and succeeded in pulling off the wig of white hair, revealing the familiar brown hair that had been hidden beneath. Xander rolled his eyes a bit but reached up just the same to remove the fake pointed ears that'd come with the costume in order to come as close as possible to looking like the cartoon variation of Puck. Seeing him grasp the ears, she waited to see him pull them off so that his normal ears could be seen but oddly enough that didn't happen. She watched as a look of puzzlement became one of concern as her friend seemed to be having trouble getting the ears to come off. Was there some sort of adhesive on the inside meant to keep them in place that wasn't letting go like it should be? The more time had passed, the more she began to share his concern but Buffy on the other hand was merely impatient.

"Off with the ears, Xan!" Buffy said, not having clued into the fact that there was a problem.

"I'd…like to…but…" Xander said even as he felt around the ears to see if he'd missed the seam between synthetic and organic.

"But nothing!" Buffy said, reaching forth, grabbing hold of the ears and pulling.

The result was not what was expected.

"Owowowowowowowowowowow!" Xander cried out in pain even as Buffy upped her efforts to remove the ears that continued to resist removal. "Buffy! Buffy! They're not coming off! STOP!"

They're not coming off?

"What did you use to keep those fake ears in place?" Buffy asked, looking stumped as to why she'd been unable to pry them off.

"I…I don't think they're fake anymore," Xander said with a bit of anxiety like when they were on patrol and one of them heard a sound they couldn't immediately identify.

Seeing him withdraw his hands, she saw proof to verify his statement.

Instead of consistent color she could see red scattered across the ears like real ones would have if someone pulled or pinched them roughly. When she looked even closer, she noticed that they didn't have some of the basic signs of being artificial like she'd seen in other accessories at Ethan's costume shop. They didn't have the artificial coloring and, unless the owner of the place had hired a master from Hollywood to make them, the only possible conclusion was that they had indeed become real.

They had indeed become a part of Xander's head.

"Oh dear," Giles muttered as looked at the young man with worry.

"Yeah. What Giles said," she said as she considered what kind of additional baggage might've come with the ears.


	2. It Won't Come Off No Matter What I Try!

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the copyrighted materials contained herein. They are the rightful property of their respective creators and/or associated companies. I make no profit from this whatsoever and I have no intention of changing this at any point in the future. I write because it's fun and because there are those who enjoy reading my stories.

 _ **Sunnydale High School Library**_

 _ **Giles' POV**_

"This is indeed ominous, Xander," he said as he closely examined the ears, looking for any clues as to their nature as well as the likelihood that they were permanent. "Do you feel as though anything else is amiss?"

"Not really. I don't hear Puck talking in my head and I haven't seen so much as a sparkle of magic since you shut down the spell," Xander replied, sounding a bit uneasy but no longer fearful. "Then again I haven't tried dishing out any rhymes. Want me to try?"

Remembering some of the magic Puck had performed since they'd first met hours ago, he considered this a bad idea since the mixing of two different types of magic could produce dangerous results. When added to the fact that that sort of power in the hands of someone completely ignorant of the rules of magic and completely lacking in instruction…

"I believe I have a better method for determining just how deep your changes may have progressed," he said as he moved to enter his office.

His idea was a bit dangerous but it would indeed prove whether or not Xander's changes were merely just a set of pointed ears or something more serious. Carefully he began to sift through the various implements and items on his office desk until he found one that suited his needs. He examined it from all sides and, once he was satisfied, he returned to the main area of the library to see if yet another problem had been added to his dilemma.

"Hold out your arm, Xander."

Trusting him the young man did as asked and so, with as much care as he could without invalidating the test, he'd devised he pressed the metal letter opener against Xander's exposed flesh. Almost immediately he noticed pain on the young man's flesh and smoke began to rise from where the two things met, so he pulled back the letter opener. Looking at the damage done he could see that, while not as severe as what would happen if a cross were pressed to the skin of a vampire, it was still proof enough that Xander was no longer quite human. Indeed there were only certain nonhuman species that had a reaction like the one he'd just witnessed to wrought iron.

"Ow! Anything else you'd like to try, G-Man?" Xander asked somewhat sharply from the pain. "Poking me in the eye with it maybe?"

"My apologies, Xander, but it was the only test I could think of that would produce immediate results." He was genuinely sorry that he'd caused the young man any pain but speed was of the essence. "I would say that this is confirmation enough that you are no longer human. Given the pointed ears that are now yours, I think it is safe to say that you are indeed at least part Fairy."

"HEY! I'll have you know I like the ladies as much as the next straight guy!" Xander exclaimed in defense of his companion preferences.

Giles sighed. Bloody Americans. "I did not mean 'fairy' as it is used in slang but rather the term used in folklore and mythology. Also referred to as Fae and generally perceived as a form of spirit," he said, clarifying his statement before they could be further misinterpreted. "Since your transformed personae identified himself as 'Puck' it is likely that your changes are centered on the cartoon variation of the Shakespearean character. Whether or not you are capable of magic now… it would be something best done under controlled conditions."

He could tell from the young man's expression that he recognized his mistake and was taking the information he'd provided just now as seriously.

"Gotcha. No tossing the mojo without your permission."

"Fortunately there are not many things that are made from wrought iron in modern times. The only places you would likely find it would be in structures or items made in the eighteen hundreds and earlier. True, there are a few things, like my letter opener, that were manufactured after that point but they should be easy enough to avoid."

Still it would mean that until he found a way to reverse the transformation he would have to ensure that any weapons the young man used had as little wrought iron in them as possible. He doubted that he would be able to get Xander to remain out of patrols for the duration of his condition even if it would be safer for all involved but he could still minimize the risks as best he could. He knew better than most how dangerous magic could be in the hands of the ill-trained and inexperienced person even if they had the best of intentions.

As the hours ticked by he continued to sift through the books he had on chaos magic, Janus and transformation magic in an effort to find a way to help Willow. With paper and pen to write notes he began to put down information that, based on his observations, pertained to the young woman's condition while ignoring the rest. Locating or even constructing an effective counter spell depended on thoroughly researching the variables involved from the smallest to the biggest. Like intricate handmade clocks there were so many moving components involved that had to be taken into account both on their own as well as how they all interacted together to produce the desired result.

Hopefully the forces involved wouldn't be too complex or else he would have to contact the Council's mage division for expert consultation.

That could lead to word of what had happened reaching Travers and his faction in the upper echelons of the Watcher's Council.

If that happened… the head of the Council would almost certainly forbid him from 'wasting Council resources' any further.

If he was lucky.

If he were unlucky the man would let him think he was working unnoticed when in fact his personal agents would travel to Sunnydale to investigate the matter personally. He very much doubted that he would be able to undo Willow and Xander's conditions before then, so word would almost certainly reach England before long. Then… then Travers would either evaluate both teenagers as potential weapons in the war against demonkind or he would insist that Buffy sever all contact with them since they were no longer human.

He didn't even want to think about the darker order Travers might pass down.

It was the opinion of many members of the Council that the current protocols for dealing with nonhumans was far too relaxed for the war they were fighting. Even if the species of demon or a member of a supernatural race were far from being hostile towards the human race, those people believed that the Earth should be for humans and humans alone. That only the animals and the plants that fed the human race should be permitted to share space with mankind. If those people had their way, both the Slayer and the wet works teams that Travers thought he didn't know about would hunt down every nonhuman on the planet. Officially the head of the Watcher's Council did not condone this point of view and supported the protocols that had existed for centuries. Unofficially the man did nothing to put a stop to such talk and any who violated the protocols were given the lightest punishments Travers could get away with giving without being suspected of approving of their actions.

It was this that made him unsure as to where the proverbial wind would blow if news of the consequences of Halloween made it across the Atlantic.

In the end by the time the clock revealed that sunrise was five minutes away, he felt confident that his understanding of the transformations had definitely improved. He was still intimidated by the challenge of undoing work enabled by the Roman god Janus, using such unpredictable forces, but he owed it to Xander and Willow to give it his all just the same. He knew well how one magic spell could affect a person's life and how hard it was to adjust when all hope of undoing the damage was lost. He would not let it happen here! Not so long as he had resources to tap and willpower in his heart!

"Should be any second now," Xander said, looking at the library windows. "In the cartoon the transformation began the second the top of the sun peeked above the horizon."

He'd already checked with the relevant sources so he knew as precisely as possible when that would happen but there'd still be a couple of seconds leeway. With one eye on his watch and the occasional glance at the window he waited but it turned out that the first sign of the transformation was a gasp of pain from Willow. This caused Xander, Buffy and himself to lock their eyes on her, but what happened next made sure that blinking became very undesirable. A strong spike of pain hit Willow, almost proving to be enough to drop her to her knees, but possibly on will alone she managed to remain standing. She still cried out, though, and he was not surprised because far from being a battle hardened soldier who could tolerate it she was merely a teenage high school student. The first dramatic change then happened as hands that had been three fingers and a thumb turned into four fingers and a thumb. In a way it reminded him of someone taking clay and forming the four digit hand first then reshaping it with as little effort as possible into a five digit hand. He then watched the same thing happen to the feet as they went from one that made it necessary to move on the balls of her feet to a normal human flat one with five toes.

The most dramatic change happened when both the wings as well as the tail began to spasm as though electricity was being channeled through them. Then her body appeared to suck them inwards, incorporating them into her main body, until nothing was left but smooth flesh that faded into Willow's normal skin color rather than the blue color it'd been up until then.

Then it was over and Willow collapsed to the ground, almost going down all the way if Xander hadn't been quick enough to catch her in his arms. She was panting as she adjusted to the drop in pain but he could tell that it would take an hour or two before she'd be free of it entirely. Nevertheless it was a positive point that the transformation did not appear to have done her any visible harm.

He would have to wait and observe how long it took for her to regain full use of her body, as well as any lingering signs of pain to vanish entirely. Only then would he be able to classify the transformation as something that had to be kept from happening any more than absolutely necessary.

"I know it's stupid to ask, Willow, but: how do you feel?" Xander asked with a voice filled with a mix of concern and awkwardness.

"Y-you remember all those cartoons where the coyote ran off a cliff onto air and only fell once he realized there was nothing under his feet?" Willow asked with a shaky voice as she turned her head of wild red hair.

"Yeah?" Xander replied, sounding like he had a pretty good idea what the young woman was getting at.

"I think I'd like to be the coyote AFTER he's hit the ground instead of this," Willow said, sounding somewhat traumatized but not enough that he would have to consider medication or professional help.

"You're tough, Willow," Xander said with as much confidence as he could manage. "Most people wouldn't have been able to handle finding out the truth about the world never mind make the choice to fight against the monsters from beneath their beds. Not you. Don't ever doubt that you've got what it takes to handle this until Giles comes up with the counter spell."

Willow didn't say anything but the grateful smile made it clear she appreciated her best friend's support.

That support would likely be the only thing that would make her life bearable until he found what he needed.

 _ **A Sidewalk in Sunnydale**_

 _ **Xander's POV**_

 _I think I'll resurrect Rayne anyways,_ he thought as he walked to his home. _She might not have died but Willow's gonna be put through hell for weeks until Giles can work his mojo. I made a promise a long time ago: anyone hurts my Willow and they get hell as payback!_

If he were really being honest with himself he wouldn't actually try to dabble in resurrection magic since he didn't have a lick of magical potential in him plus he'd read enough comics to know that bringing people back from the dead can have unforeseen consequences. It didn't change the fact that he was angry that his best bud had been put through coyote pancake levels of pain less than an hour ago. He never liked seeing her in pain and it was partly because of that that he did his best to lighten up any sour mood and make sure a smile replaced any bad expression on her face. Not that he didn't know that there were certain times that seriousness was required but Willow had a hard enough time with her parents being away with their careers for most of the year. They did their best to make it back for her birthday and the big holidays when families were expected to stick together but they were still away from home more than they were home. This had forced Willow to learn how to do things like cook, clean and do her homework without the support of parents and it was his opinion that that shouldn't happen until mid to late teens, when moving onto college became likely.

Still, the redhead had done admirably taking care of herself and he'd helped when and where he could even though he'd made a few… ahem… mistakes here and there.

Companies really should label those bottles better.

As he came into sight of his home he seriously hoped that his parents were still unconscious from their usual pastime of who could outdrink the other. He'd stayed out later than he'd ever expected due to wanting to be there for Willow when she changed back into a human so he hadn't been able to make his usual 'safe to sneak into the house' time like usual. He definitely didn't want Tony to see him in his Puck costume, even if he didn't have the wig on his head anymore, but unless they all of a sudden decided to stick him in the basement there'd always be a risk of being spotted.

 _Here's hoping the Harris Luck decides to have pity on me just this once._

When he started walking up the walkway to the front door of his house, though, he noticed something that had him on edge and wishing that he'd had the foresight to carry the usual patrol package home with him this night. Inside his house he could see lights of different colors flitting about and he knew that, outside of Christmas lights, no normal house lights produced the same effect. In Sunnydale that usually meant something Hellmouthy was happening and made him think either magic users or demons that had glowy bits. Crouching down he picked up the baseball bat that Tony often used to threaten the newspaper boy if he had a particularly bad hangover at the time. He knew it probably wouldn't do much against whatever was inside his house but something was better than nothing and, if he was lucky, it'd be effective enough for him to make a break for it.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he turned the door knob before, at the same rate of speed, he pushed the door open using the widening gap to peer inside.

The more advanced notice he could get of whatever was creating the light show inside the greater his odds of survival.

It was only when the door was almost a third of the way open that he got his first look at the intruders: tiny little people with insect wings that gave off different colored light as they flew about. He'd almost classified them as fairies but for some reason that didn't seem right to him, so he put the label of pixies on them instead. If he recalled the night soon after they'd officially founded the Scoobies, Willow had once asked Giles about every mythological and supernatural life form she could name to find out if they really existed or not. While the redhead had been disheartened to know that many had become extinct due to less than benevolent encounters with humans, pixies apparently were still thriving in various parts of the world. The Watcher's description of them made them sound relatively harmless and at times amusing, so this did much to lower the threat level in his mind.

Then he remembered what he was at the moment and recalled Giles citing how fairies and pixies weren't exactly on good terms.

Then again most of Giles' books were a century or more old, so it was possible the bad blood had disappeared by now.

Just the same, though, he'd keep the bat close.

Fully stepping into the house and trying to act casual, it didn't take long for one of the pixies to spot him and the reaction was SO not what he'd been expecting.

"He's HERE! The PRINCE is HERE!" the pixie giving off red light yelled at the top of her lungs. "Everyone get in here NOW!"

Almost at once two more pixies, one giving off green light while another gave off blue light, and something that at best looked like something that was a cross between a hedgehog and an elf showed up. All of them looked to be in terribly good cheer so, unless they were the sort that enjoyed causing pain, either to themselves or others, he didn't think he had much to worry about.

"Wait! Prince!?" he asked rhetorically after his brain caught up to what the red pixie had said. "You sure you have the right house, ma'am, because I'm fairly sure that if I was royalty I'd know it what with the whole mountains of money and living in a mansion bit."

"Oh we have the right house, Alexander," the red pixie replied with a joyous smile on her face. "We've been living here after a fashion since it was built so there's no chance of a mistake."

"Since it was built? Funny, I don't recall seeing any fluttering red light flying about growing up," he said, poking a hole in the…woman's…position. "It definitely would have been the first thing to catch my attention as a kid."

"Yes, well, there were certain rules we had to follow when we brought you here and one of them was no magic until a certain condition was met," the red pixie said, looking like she hadn't been happy about the condition but had gone along with it. "But now that condition has been met and we're all the better for it!"

Okay. This was getting a little weird for him so, like with all odd situations, it'd probably be best to start from the beginning, especially if he wanted his somewhat fatigued brain to absorb it all.

"Look, howsabout you all introduce yourselves and then tell me, from the beginning, why you think I'm this prince? Okay?" he asked, hoping that things would make more sense in a few minutes.

"Very well. My name is Knotgrass, this is Thistlewit, that is Flittle and finally he is Chortata," Knotgrass replied, pointing to each nonhuman being in turn. "We have been taking care of you ever since the Eternus Curse over you lifted sixteen years ago."

He'd been cursed as a baby? Who the hell would do that?!

"Though if you're asking for the real beginning, then that would involve telling you about Maleficent, your mother." Thistlewit said, bobbing her head up and down making, her blonde hair jiggle.

"O-kayyy… weird names, talking about curses and claiming I'm the son of an evil fictional character." He reevaluated the sanity of the beings floating or standing in front of him. "Have you guys been taking your medication like you're supposed to?"

"First of all she's not fictional and secondly you'd do well to treat that… that… RUBBISH… movie like the feces it really is! It completely rearranges what really happened back then and doesn't portray Maleficent accurately at all!" Flittle exclaimed, looking about as angry as he sometimes got when people got certain Star Wars facts wrong.

The cartoon movie was based on something that actually happened? He tried to picture it in his mind but he kept seeing the Technicolor version he'd first seen as a kid.

"Well then why don't you give me your version of what happened?" he asked, deciding it'd probably be best to hear the pixie out before continuing.

"Very well," Knotgrass said, nodding in agreement. "Well, this all began in the year thirteen thirty-five in the country you know as France. It was in a fairly unknown region of the country divided into the Moors where we lived along with various other races humans consider to be myth and the human area ruled by the tyrannical Marquis Henry."

From there the pixie spun a tale that was completely unlike what he'd been expecting, even if it did contain certain elements from the classic Disney movie; a tale of an innocent Maleficent who protected the Moors from invaders but nevertheless didn't deal too harshly with any humans who wandered in and tended to forgive thieves so long as they returned what they stole. Then came a day when she met a young boy named Stefan, who'd come into the Moors looking for treasure. At first she'd merely treated him like any other trespasser and thief but when he returned to talk to her the next day a friendship began to take form. It didn't last as long as some but it was still strong, making it all the more sad when the boy's visits began to drop in frequency over the course of years.

It wasn't until a few days after Maleficent had succeeded in repelling an invasion by the tyrant Marquis Henry that Stefan returned, claiming he wished to warn her about her enemy's declaration. Whosoever managed to slay the 'evil Maleficent' would be named his successor and marry his daughter to become the new ruler of the realm. This proved too be too big a temptation for Stefan, who'd become one of Henry's servants, to ignore and drove him to use his old friendship with the guardian of the Moors to manipulate her into a position of vulnerability. A bit of sleeping potion intended to put her into a deep slumber mixed in with some drink he'd brought with him. Since their only source of information had been Maleficent, they only knew that when the guardian awoke she found that her wings had been cut off while she'd slept. This caused the woman sorrow and pain unlike anything else, for it would mean that the skies would be forever denied her and it hadn't taken her long to realize who'd done the deed.

This had darkened Maleficent's heart and filled it with rage that only grew larger when she'd learned the reasons why her treacherous ex-friend Stefan had taken her wings. As was often the case in such a magical place as the Moors, the land was influenced by the guardian's emotions and magic leading the place to become decidedly darker and less friendly. It wasn't until news reached her that Stefan had an heir, a girl, that Maleficent took action, arriving with all the other well-wishers who'd come with gifts and the like. Instead of something good being handed over, Maleficent placed a curse on baby girl: on the first day after her sixteenth birthday the then teenage girl would prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into a deathlike slumber. Only some last minute begging on the part of Stefan prompted Maleficent to add an escape clause: the curse would only be broken by true love's kiss.

 _While I can understand how pissed she'd be after being stabbed in the back by a friend and having the equivalent of her legs chopped off, cursing a child is inexcusable._ He did not approve of the form the revenge took in the least. _If she had a problem with Stefan, she should've cursed him directly._

In an effort to protect his daughter the marquis had the three of them, who'd come to the castle hoping to build bridges of friendship with the king, to take his daughter into hiding until two days past her sixteenth birthday. Stefan also had every single spinning wheel in his lands taken to the lowest level of his dungeons and burned until they were all destroyed. Unfortunately the three pixies admitted that they hadn't had any experience raising a human child or even hiding from someone out in the middle of nowhere, so Maleficent easily found them. Rather than show herself the dark ruler of the Moors merely observed and occasionally stepped in when the pixies proved dangerously incompetent in taking care of Aurora. The vengeful woman nicknamed the girl 'beastie' and, when she wasn't dealing with Marquis Stefan's efforts to kill her, she watched over Aurora.

It was on Aurora's fifteenth birthday that she finally met Maleficent face to face but, much to the latter's surprise, the blonde revealed that she'd always been aware of the former guardian's presence and aid. Out of curiosity and a lessened dislike Maleficent allowed the girl to spend some time in the Moors with her and, as a result, a mother-daughter bond was formed. This bond became so strong that one night, after putting the teenager to bed, the strongest of the fairies tried to remove her curse but sadly remembered that when it'd been cast she had proclaimed that no power on earth could lift it. No power… including her own.

Only true love's kiss could do it.

Then, as if to make matters worse, on the day before Aurora's sixteenth birthday when she'd intended to officially stay in the Moors with her fairy godmother, she met Prince Philip and love at first sight came into play. Unseen by the two youths Maleficent's servant Diaval saw this as a means by which the curse could be lifted but, still cynical because of her past, his mistress disagreed, believing that there was no such thing as true love. Things took a turn for the worse when Knotgrass revealed that, on the eve of Aurora's return to her father, the three pixies told her the truth about her circumstances and the curse she was under. This drove the young girl to confront Maleficent, who confirmed the existence of the curse while feeling great shame at what she'd done.

It had been when the girl had left for her father's castle that Maleficent had chosen to seek out Prince Philip, since she had sensed the curse coming closer and closer to fruition. It had turned out to be a race against the coming sunset and the powerful fairy failed and Aurora fell under the curse as originally intended. Nevertheless Maleficent still travelled to the Marquis' castle, hoping that one kiss from the prince would break the curse and lift the guilt she was feeling.

It hadn't been easy.

In the sixteen years since the girl's birth Stefan had become quite obsessed and more than a little paranoid where the former guardian of the Moors was concerned. As a result the man had not only outfitted his soldiers with wrought iron weapons and armor but had also constructed a web of thorns about the castle made of the same metal. It'd been an obvious effort to mimic the thorn barrier Maleficent had erected to keep humans out of the Moors and it was quite well done. According to what they'd been told by the former guardian, after everything was over with, it had required impressive contortion abilities and skill to safely enter the castle without a scratch. Once inside Maleficent, Diaval and an unconscious Prince Philip made their way to Aurora's room and, once there, the young man was abruptly woken up before being nudged towards the sleeping blonde. From concealment Maleficent watched the scene unfold hoping that this would indeed break the curse but disappointment turned out to be the theme that night for, even after a romantic kiss, nothing happened.

It was when Knotgrass and her fellow pixies had left, though, that Maleficent, in tears over what she had done and what would now be, bent over and kissed Aurora on the forehead. According to Maleficent, who told the pixies about what'd happened later, a miracle happened because, instead of romantic love breaking the curse, it was instead motherly love that did the job. Aurora awoke and was overjoyed to see her! Together the girl, Maleficent and Diaval moved to flee the castle since it'd been decided that they'd live in the Moors from that day forward.

When they reached a large open area complications arose in the form of Stefan and his men appearing with wrought iron weapons and restraints. A battle ensued and, before she was too distracted to do so, Maleficent had used her magic to transform Diaval into a dragon. The former guardian and her servant put up a brave fight but, with superior numbers and wrought iron weapons, it was only a matter of time before Marquis Stefan had Maleficent at his mercy. Brutally the man had beaten the woman, taunting her all the while with cruel words, but when Stefan moved to end it all hope arrived in the form of Maleficent's wings. Apparently the previous marquis had chosen to keep them and place them in a trophy room of sorts in a glass case ribbed with wrought iron bars. With them free Aurora's fairy godmother had been restored to full strength and easily managed to turn the tables on both Stefan and his men

In the end only Stefan remained and, while the temptation to kill him had been there, Maleficent chose not to. The marquis, on the other hand, was not so wise because he attacked once more and, after a brief airborne struggle, the man plummeted to his death on the stone ground of the castle courtyard. It had been with that man's death that peace finally came to the land because, not only did Aurora inherit the marquis' land and title, but Maleficent also named her the new queen of the Moors. Thus a single ruler governed the formerly separate lands, ensuring nevermore would the two peoples do battle to subjugate the other.

 _Not a bad story and I can see where Disney changed things to favor the human crowd, but it still doesn't answer one question._ "Nice story but what does it have to do with me?"

"Well, you see, during the sixteen years that Aurora was gone Marquis Stefan deteriorated mentally and used up quite a bit of his land's resources and manpower hunting Maleficent. At first his subjects didn't mind this since they could understand why he was doing it and sympathized. However, as his mind weakened, his demands of his people went up until many became worried. Some tried to politely protest and convince Stefan to show a little restraint."

"I take it this didn't go over well with the man?" he asked even though his instincts told him his question was something of an understatement.

"Not at all. He had all the protesters either executed or sentenced to life imprisonment in the dungeons. Once they were gone he replaced them with people who hated Maleficent and the Moors as much as he did, or people who'd follow his orders without question." Knotgrass' look made it clear she thought he was the master of understatement. "When Aurora became queen she gave them one chance to comply with the peace between humans and the species of the Moors. It didn't take them long before they made an attempt to assassinate her so she exiled them from her lands."

"They didn't stay gone, did they?" he asked, knowing that people like that rarely went quietly.

"No. First, though, there are some things to get out of the way before we get back to them," Knotgrass replied, her mood improving. "In the ten years that followed prosperity overflowed in the realm and noble men replaced the hateful ones that'd been exiled. One of them even took a fancy to Maleficent when he saw her and, while it took most of the following ten years, they gradually became quite close."

This caused Thistlewit and Flittle to titter with laughter, likely due to the memories of those times.

He had a sinking feeling he knew where this was going.

"It was during the fall of the tenth year that Maleficent became pregnant with you by the nobleman and we'd genuinely thought that nothing could be better." Knotgrass said with equal joy before her mood took a sudden downturn. "Sadly it was at the beginning of the eleventh year that danger approached the realm. The nobles who'd been exiled from Aurora's lands had returned and they were not alone. Behind them was an army armed for the singular purpose of wiping out the Moors and removing Aurora from power."

"Where'd they get the army? They don't just grow on trees," he said, not liking the direction the story was going.

"The exiles had apparently chosen to go to the capital of France and appeal to King Philip the Sixth for aid. This was in the years leading up to the Hundred Years' War with Edward the Third, so it had indeed been in Philip's interests to get any internal dispute over with quickly," Knotgrass explained, not showing much love for the French king. "When added to the lies, horror stories and the 'nobility' of their cause, they gained what they needed for revenge and conquest. Philip, though, likely was also interested in the stories of precious gems and gold coins that supposedly could be found in the Moors. All lies, of course.

"In any case, Aurora and Maleficent brought forth their own armies, both human and of the Moors, but before the fighting truly began diplomacy was attempted with King Philip's representative. Aurora tried to convince the man that he and his forces were being used and that she as well as those she ruled were completely loyal to King Philip," Knotgrass said as she continued with the tale. "Sadly the man had been quite dedicated to France's dominant religion at the time and saw any sort of peace or alliance with Maleficent and the Moors as consorting with the devil. He vowed to rid France of this land of darkness and all who lived within it.

"The battles in the days that followed were fierce, with warriors on both sides falling. Aurora and Maleficent were greatly outnumbered with the latter hindered by the abundance of wrought iron being used by the enemy army. The struggle went off and on for months, neither side being able to gain enough momentum to bring matters to a close," Knotgrass said with mixed emotions. "It was eleven months after the battles began though that news both joyous and troubling arose: Maleficent was pregnant with her lover's child. As a result she was forced to withdraw from the front lines and support from the rear as best she could. This sudden change only emboldened the invading forces as they saw this as a sign of weakness and as an opportunity to seize victory.

"All efforts were made to hold them back but it wasn't until the battle reached its peak that something happened to make it clear the fighting was merely a distraction. While the warriors loyal to Aurora fought, the original exiles accompanied by a mage slipped into the Moors and approached the clearing where Maleficent was about to give birth. Filth that they were, they actually waited until you had been born and your parents had time to bask in your presence before they made their move." Knotgrass was clearly angry even centuries later about what had happened. "While the exiles dealt with your father, the mage confronted Maleficent with evil intent. Your mother did her best to fight him off with the magic she possessed but the process of childbirth had drained her of much of her strength. In the end she was defeated but not before she used what strength she had left to place protective wards upon you to shield you from harm.

"The evil mage took this as a challenge and, with power rarely seen in humans, he cast the Eternus Curse. The exiles had desired this specifically since they had found it a delicious form of revenge given its similarities to the curse Maleficent had placed on Aurora. The curse placed both you and your mother in a deep sleep, never to awaken until you cast your first spell," Knotgrass said with haunted eyes leading him to believe she might have witnessed the curse being cast.

"But if I was asleep then there'd be no way I could've cast a spell," he said, connecting the dots in his mind.

"That was the point. After the curse was successfully cast the mage even gloated that while Maleficent would endure the curse for centuries, you would not since due to your human half, your lifespan would not be as great as your mother's. It was only after your father was informed of the full ramifications of the curse that the exiles finally slew him, intent on making him a ghost chained forever to the mortal plane by the sorrow of what he'd lost." Knotgrass clearly still felt the pain of that awful day. "While the exiles and the mage had said that they intended to place you and your mother in a secure location where they could amuse themselves with your tragedy at their leisure, neither we four nor Diaval could allow this. Sooner or later hatred of your mother and of you would get the better of them so it was with the gift of transformation that Maleficent had given him that her faithful servant transformed into a dragon.

"With surprise and a torrent of flame he forced the mage away from both you and your mother before taking the two of you gently into his talons and flying away. We followed as quickly as we were able but there were times that I wished we hadn't as we watched as the last of our forces were overrun by those led by King Philip's representative. "With Maleficent and you cursed it was a devastating blow to morale. Nevertheless they all fought bravely and the last of them were able to safely escape with Aurora but the realm as a whole fell to King Philip's forces. Most of the people of the Moors fled to other realms, as did the humans still loyal to Aurora, but at risk of reprisals from the exiles and their allies.

"Some went north to the United Kingdom while others went elsewhere. Generally speaking any place that they thought they could find safe refuge. As for us… we were determined to find a means by which the curse on your mother and yourself could be lifted. We searched far and wide for a mage capable of breaking it but sadly none proved capable of accomplishing the task," Knotgrass said before a small grin appeared. "We did, however, find a means by which you could be kept alive, along with your mother, until the curse WAS lifted though. We encountered a rather famous alchemist known as Nicolas Flamel, who had done what none had before: he created the Philosopher's Stone. It was a magical stone capable of producing the Elixir of Life. The Elixir grants the user an indefinitely extended life for as long as they continued drink it on a fairly regular basis. While it was true that you couldn't consciously drink it, we were able to get it down your throat just the same.

"By extending your lifespan indefinitely we had all the time we needed to undo the curse. All that Flamel asked in return for the Elixir of Life was to ask a few questions when we met about the Moors and the races that lived there," Flittle said, taking over the explanation. "It would take too long to tell you all of what we did but suffice it to say we only rested as much as we had to in between efforts to lift the curse. For six hundred years we scoured the world, each taking turns watching over you while the others searched, but it wasn't until twenty years ago that a seer gave us true hope. She told us that if we brought you 'to the mouth of hell that lies in the dale' half our quest would be fulfilled.

"It was only after we arrived here with you and your mother that the truth was revealed more plainly. You awoke. Whether it was due to the energies of the Hellmouth or the protections placed upon you by your mother, you awoke looking none the worse for wear. All who were present celebrated, believing that it was now only a matter of time before Maleficent awoke as well," Flittle said before the joy soured somewhat. "Sadly it was not a week later that the past caught up with us. We had always assumed that after the destruction of the Moors and the conquering of the neighboring human kingdom that the exiles and their mage accomplice had given up their pursuit. We were wrong."

"Their descendants?"

"Yes. Instead of their hatred dying with them they passed it down to their descendants, charging them with the task of hunting us down and killing the lot of us. The only reason we had not encountered them before then was the sheer size of the world and the fact that we could cover more ground than they could during the run of a day since we could fly." Thistlewit said, sounding unhappy at the memory. "However, with the invention of airplanes and trains, I suspect they were able to keep up with us much better. They attacked without warning during the celebration and we would have lost much had we not been saved at the last minute by… ahem… a concerned citizen. He drove them off but his aid did not come for free."

"No it did not. He told us that in return for his protection only you or your mother could remain on the Hellmouth and that until the curse was lifted in full we were forbidden from performing magic. He even stipulated that we had to take on human forms of his choosing and keep the truth from you as well," Knotgrass said, sounding angry at the terms of their protection. "That is where the true forms of Tony and Jessica Harris came from, Alexander. The man insisted that pretending to be abusive drunks would make it that much more likely to be overlooked should the descendants of the exiles return."

He could see the logic in that even if he didn't like how he'd grown up any more than any other sane person would.

"But now that's all over with and it shouldn't take long for Maleficent to awaken now that the curse has been lifted!" Knotgrass said, all smiles and joyous expressions.

"The timing couldn't be better, too, seeing as how the Philosopher's Stone was destroyed a little over two years ago." Flittle said, sounding just as happy as her fellow pixie.

"Wait. If I'm half fairy then why don't I have wings or pointy ears or anything?" he asked, trying to determine just how much credence to give the story. "I mean, sure, I have pointy ears now but that's because of the chaos spell that got cast tonight."

"Chaos spell?" Thistlewit asked curiously as brow scrunched up a bit.

"Guess it's my turn to make with the story telling."

For the next hour he explained to them everything that happened, from getting 'volunteered' by Snyder to seeing Willow safely home. By that point, though, he was well and truly tired, so with a half-polite goodnight he went to bed, asking not to be woken up for at least seven hours. Naturally the three pixies and the elf hedgehog thing were happy to oblige, given the good mood they were all in, with Flittle promising a good meal would be waiting for him.

He just nodded.

Sleep was more important than thinking was at the moment.

 _ **The Mayor's Office, Richard Wilkins' POV**_

"Well now!" he said as he confirmed through his own means what he'd sensed hours ago. "Isn't this a surprise? I honestly thought the boy would grow old and die before his heritage came into full bloom. Life sure is full of surprises!"

He had to chuckle a bit because, in the long years of his life, he was not surprised very often and that was because he went out of his way to plan for everything, down to the smallest variable. It was necessary considering the end goal he'd set for himself and, when you lived atop a Hellmouth, complications were plentiful. Sometimes all it took was a strongly worded warning to get potential troublemakers to rethink interfering with his plan but sometimes he had to be a little more… graphic. Still, he supposed that even the most meticulous planner couldn't take everything into account and that would be where back up plans proved useful.

Now, up until Halloween he'd intended to use William the Bloody to distract or, if need be, remove Slayer Summers from the game board. However, thanks to Miss Rosenberg's costume personae, all that remained was Drusilla and she was hardly in the most reliable of mental states. Still… she could prove to be a suitable scapegoat. So long as enough clues were left connecting what he would do to the mad vampire seer no one would suspect anyone else. Even if the seer tried to tell them that she had nothing to do with whatever he arranged, no one would believe her given her insanity. It would take time to properly choose a means by which he could remove the latest nuisance to his plans but, since he was thankfully anonymous to all save those he had an 'understanding' with, it would be fine.

He needn't worry about the young man's minders, they were more a threat to themselves than others, especially since the only dangerous one was half a world away protecting his mistress.

By the time she awoke he will have ascended to a form more than capable of slaying her and her half-breed son would be dead.

All would happen as he had foreseen.

 _ **Sunnydale High School , Buffy's POV**_

Two days.

That was how much time had passed since Halloween and only the fact that it'd happened on a Friday had allowed her best friends time to cope with their conditions. Tomorrow, though, school would resume and while Willow would have no difficulties since it was during the day, Xander's pointed ears would attract attention. Sure, for the first few days it could be passed off as a costume complication but when more than a week went by without change, that excuse would no longer work.

 _I'm sure Giles can work some mojo to hide the ears,_ she thought as the doors to the library got closer. _Either that or Xander can just let his hair grow long enough to cover them._

Daydreaming for a moment she tried to picture how her friend would look with hair long enough to completely cover his ears. Naturally she used the haircuts sported by celebrities she'd seen in her teen magazines or on television and she had to admit the first few hairdos looked pretty good on him. Sure, he'd probably need some styling and hair care tips to keep it looking respectable but she figured that if she and Willow could keep his guy impulses in check, they could teach him to take care of his hair. He'd complain about it, of course, not much caring about his appearance beyond the basics, but maybe if his new look attracted a girl… a CERTAIN redhead, he'd decide to keep it. She always thought that Xander could really stand out if he just took a little time to touch himself up in the right places.

 _If it's just a cash problem I'm sure I can convince my mom to pitch in just this once,_ she thought as she reached out to push the library doors open. _She's had a soft spot for Xander ever since he first came over._

Sure, she knew that her mom was probably hoping that she hooked up with him, it's what moms did, but she just didn't see her guy friend like that. He was loyal, brave and was always there when she needed him, but there was just no spark between the two of them. So, rather than let her mom pin her hopes on Xander as future son-in-law for too long, she'd hook him up with Willow as soon as was feasibly possible. The only obstacle in her path really was that the idiot had slipped the redhead into the 'sister' column and that made any romance impossible outside of banjo country. She'd tried in the costume store to get Willow to wear something sexier, something guaranteed to get Xander thinking with his lust engine, but it hadn't worked and she'd been forced to accept strong C.E.O. woman instead.

Considering the pain Willow went through every sunrise and sunset, she really wished she'd pressed the sexy lady outfit harder because, whatever the side effects of that might've been, it couldn't have been worse than a torturous twice a day transformation.

"Are you sure about what you were told, Xander?" she heard Giles ask upon entering the library and, when she saw him cleaning his glasses, she knew something had come up.

"They didn't seem to be lying, if that's what you're talking about," Xander said, sounding mostly sure of. "Still, you're the book guy. What do you know about Maleficent? Aside from the cartoon movie, of course."

"Merely stories, I'm afraid," Giles replied, sounding a bit discouraged. "The majority of them don't paint her in a very flattering light but a few give a fairly balanced view of her."

"Any of them match the story I was told?" Xander asked in measured tones.

"A little bit here and there implying that there may indeed be some truth to what you were told," Giles replied, looking like he was devising a plan as they spoke. "I will have to contact some friends I have on the Council who specialize in French folklore and mythology. If anyone can determine the veracity of the pixies' claims, it would be them."

"What's going on?" she asked, not liking one bit being left out of the loop.

"After Xander got home from the library yesterday morning, he encountered three pixies and a Hedgehog fairy. They informed him that he was in actuality the half-breed son of a fairy queen from long ago," Giles replied, focusing his gaze on her. "According to them that is the real reason his Halloween changes have remained instead of vanishing like most of the others who've changed."

"Okay, so Xander's got some nutso pixies feeding him a load of nonsense." she said, not particularly caring about what'd been said. "Give me the right weapon and I'll clear them out of Xander's place while his parents are at work."

"WOAH! That's a little extreme, Buffy," Xander exclaimed in objection, "They didn't look all that dangerous and one of them made the best breakfast I've had in years! Let's do the whole 'innocent until proven guilty' thing and not try to slay them until they do something to deserve it."

…Fair enough.

If the pixies had really been up to no good, they would've tried to mind whammy her friend into believing whatever they said. Bad guys usually didn't bother letting their victims do themselves in on their own when they could stack the deck in their favor. Only someone incredibly confident in their ability to scheme would even attempt such a thing in the first place.

She sort of liked those types since they always had such a funny look on their faces when they realized they were going to get their asses kicked.

"So what're they doing now?" Willow asked, her curiosity obviously piqued.

"Cleaning the house from top to bottom," Xander replied with a half-smile. "Now that they're not bound anymore to act like Tony and Jessica Harris they refuse to live in a dump anymore. I saw them starting before I left for here this morning. I'm really looking forward to seeing what my house looks like clean and tidy."

She didn't like the sound of that.

She'd never been to Xander's house before and, whenever she'd asked about doing it, either he or Willow came up with a reason why it'd be a bad idea. She'd gone along with it but that didn't mean she wasn't suspicious since, in her experience, no one was that opposed to someone visiting their home unless they had something to hide there. To hear that it was dirty enough that someone would refuse to live there implied that either the people there were negligent or didn't have the money to buy cleaning supplies. Neither painted a pretty picture for her so she put it out of her mind since there was no point thinking about something that would soon be no more.

"How goes the search for a cure for Willow?" she asked, moving things along to something a little more important than the changing state of Xander's home life.

"It proceeds apace. I have almost finished the ground work and will soon begin narrowing my search." Giles replied, sounding optimistic about his future efforts. "I would prefer not to give a precise amount of time but I would hazard a guess that an attempt could be made to undo her changes in roughly six to eight weeks. I realize it is not as soon as you would prefer but meticulous care must be taken to ensure that nothing is amiss."

"Couldn't you just focus on teaching Xan to control his magic and then have him cast a spell?" she asked as an idea came to her. "I mean I… I heard about the 'Gargoyles' episode so I know Puck cast the original spell. Couldn't Xan just learn how to control his power and have him rhyme up a counter spell?"

"Magic is not that simple, Buffy. Even if Xander does have magic akin to the cartoon character, for it to exist here it must now obey the local rules of magic." Giles said, shaking his head in the negative. "As such it takes a great deal more than a well worded rhyme to achieve the desired effect."

"He seemed to be doing pretty good Halloween night," Willow said, sounding like she was interested in giving the plan a try.

"I imagine that was only because Janus was facilitating matters," Giles pointed out, no doubt trying not to get the redhead's hopes up. "With his spell ended there'd be no telling what might happen if Xander attempted to cast anything."

"Couldn't he at least TRY?" Willow asked, sounding like she wasn't going to back down easily.

"I suppose we could find someplace outside of Sunnydale to test the theory," Giles sighed, obviously realizing that it was better to agree and be present then to object and be caught unawares. "However we shall only do so ONE time. I will not risk tempting fate more than that."

"Fine by me," Willow said in complete agreement as she got out of her chair. "Let's go."

"Now?" Giles asked, sounding somewhat surprised by the suddenness.

"Why not? It's not like we've got a demon to kill and it's the weekend so we've got plenty of time," she said, pointing out that there was no reason not to.

With an aborted roll of his eyes the Watcher nodded in agreement.

"Very well. Let me gather a few things and we'll be on our way." Giles said as he turned to his office.

Watching her Watcher walk away, she wondered what form the attempt would take. Would it be something simple like levitation or would it be something flashier like a bolt of lightning? As someone who took a certain pleasure in seeing things go boom, she hoped it was the latter.

It would also mean that Xander would have a way to protect himself against the vampires and the demons, something that would take a load off of her mind and that would be quite welcome.

 _ **Outside of Sunnydale, Willow's POV**_

"Alright then," Giles said as he finished arraying a set of rune stones around what would be the testing area for Xander's magic. "Now the rune stones I've laid about will absorb any stray magic that does not strike the desired target. They have limits but, so long as you show some restraint, Xander, I do not foresee any problems."

"Don't worry, G-Man. I know the drill." Xander said, looking like he was looking forward to what he'd be doing in a few minutes. "Crawl before you walk and walk before you run."

"Precisely," Giles said with an approving nod of his head.

While she understood what the Watcher was getting at, she had confidence that Xander would prove more than capable at performing magic. Many people didn't realize this but Xander actually took ADVANCED classes with her and those were not for the timid or dull witted. Sure, he didn't get top grades like her but he hadn't been reassigned to a regular class since the two of them started at Sunnydale High School together. That meant he was smarter than he portrayed himself as and more capable than Buffy gave him credit for. So if her best friend and crush's first spell proved successful, she would do her best to persuade Giles to let him do more. If it could be proven that the risk of Xander doing magic was minimal then her friend would finally be able to make the contribution to the fight he'd always wanted. He did a good job of hiding it but she knew it bothered Xander that he was the odd person out with no significant skill to contribute to the big fight. Buffy was the Slayer, she was super good at researching and Giles had his training as a Watcher but, up until Halloween, Xander had been the normal one. Sure, he tried his best when the fighting began but having no other move than 'throw yourself at the demon and hope for the best' was not conducive to good health.

With magic and potentially flight, it would be much harder for any demon or vampire to get ahold of him without getting knocked clear off their feet.

"Now, Xander, what I want you to do is cast a spell to levitate THIS apple…" Giles said as he put the red object in the center of the area surrounded by rune stones, "…off the ground. Nothing else. JUST levitation. Understand?"

"Gotcha! Pull a poltergeist with the apple," Xander said, doing a few warm up stretches even though she doubted they'd be necessary.

They all waited with anticipation for the rhyme and they weren't disappointed.

"Little orb I am a nice guy, rise into the air and please do fly!" Xander chanted before thrusting his dominant hand towards the target.

At first failure seemed to be the outcome but then, almost faster than she could, see a bolt of emerald energy leapt from the tips of the extended fingers. Most of it struck the apple as intended but small arcs did strike the ground around it as well. Nevertheless the spell had the desired effect as the apple rose up into the air, with only a faint green glow to give a hint as to why. Looking deeper she could see that the apple was indeed moving in synch with the hand that had cast the spell strongly implying a connection.

"Oh yeah! Working with the mojo now!" Xander declared, looking like his mood was soaring higher by the second.

"Yes. Very good, my boy," Giles said sounding and looking approving. "Now set it gently on the ground."

"Sure thing!" Xander said, looking like he was ready for the next test to be sent his way.

She watched as her best friend began to lower his spell arm but, by her reckoning, he was going just a little bit too fast and the apple impacted the ground, shattering on impact. The pieces of apple didn't fly far but she along with Buffy and Giles still stepped back to make sure they didn't get hit. Looking back at her friend, she could see that he was a little embarrassed by the slip up but not enough to call off the tests.

"Ooops?" he said, scratching the back of his head briefly before letting his hand drop. "Guess I need to be a little more careful."

"I should say so. If that had been a person rather than an apple they could very well have suffered serious bruises or perhaps even a broken bone," Giles said in a somewhat reprimanding tone of voice. "Let us try it again but this time be more careful."

With that another apple was placed in the center of the circle right beside the one that'd been shattered. With visible care he repeated the chant and this time there was no delay between the final syllable of the final word and the emergence of the emerald energy. It wasn't completely perfect since tiny arcs did fly off the main bolt but still the desired effect was achieved as the second apple rose up after the ground. This one achieved the desired elevation a few seconds later but this time there was no prompt before her crush lowered the apple but a great deal more carefully than before, thus it was that that the item touched down with only a slight bounce.

"Much better," Giles said with a nod of approval. "Well it would seem that the volatility and reliability of the magic you have gained is better than I had thought. Nevertheless, let us progress slowly. It is possible that more complicated spells could prove out of your reach but we shall see about that when we get there."

This was promising since it seemed as though Giles was no longer quite so opposed to further lessons for the young man. It made her smile and she made a personal promise to herself to be there for each and every one to encourage the holder of her heart and perhaps learn a few things herself. True, she was no fairy but, just as Giles had said back in the library, all magic followed certain rules that could not be broken. If she could learn a few of them, it'd be a good start to her using magic as well.

After all she remembered from the cartoon that Demona had been quite the spellcaster herself after a thousand years of travelling the Earth. If her hunch was right then, along with the gargoyle form by night and the dusk/dawn transformation, there was a good chance she had inherited the former 'Angel of the Night's' magical aptitude. Sure, Demona was evil and wanted to wipe out the human race, but that didn't mean that she couldn't take her skills and use them for good. Unlike 'Dominique Destine' she had no ancient obsession over revenge to cloud her mind.

Hours passed as Giles had Xander try to lift heavier and heavier objects with his magic before moving on to lifting multiple objects simultaneously. There were, of course, limits to how many objects could be put inside the secure area but by the time Xander's control over the objects began to show signs of strain he proved capable manipulating seven heavy objects without too much trouble. When he'd tried to do eight, over half of them wobbled in the air.

"Well, it would seem that where levitation is concerned my worries over your magic were unfounded," Giles said, sounding a little proud of what Xander had managed thus far. "Still, levitation is a relatively simple bit of magic to perform. We shall have to tread carefully with the more complex spells since they have been known to… have unpleasant consequences if done improperly."

"Right…" Xander said with a somewhat distracted tone of voice.

"Something wrong, Xander?" she asked, knowing that a distracted Xander was a thinking Xander.

The number of times that proved to be a good thing only just barely outweighed the number of times it turned out to be a bad thing. She just hoped this time it wouldn't cost him his eyebrows. Or her hers.

"It's just that in the cartoon Puck was able to fly about like most people walk," Xander replied, sounding like he was trying to work out a conflict in his head. "That's sorta like self-levitation, right?"

"I suppose that is one way of thinking about it," Giles replied, taking a moment to clean his glasses. "However it is as I said earlier: the rules of magic in our reality are not the same as the ones defined in the cartoon. Just because 'Puck' could fly…er, self-levitate… that does not follow that you will be capable of the same."

"I know… but… ah hell! Only one way to find out," Xander said before he closed his eyes, seemingly focusing his thoughts inward.

It didn't take a genius to figure out what her best friend was trying to do and, while the others looked a little concerned, they didn't take action to stop him. When a minute had passed and the only thing changing being the level of focus Xander was showing on his face, she feared that he would be as tied down by gravity as the rest of humanity.

She should have known better.

Just as so many thought that the prophecy last year proclaiming that Buffy would die at the hands of the Master was absolute but it was overturned by one young man's stubbornness, so too was this hurdle overcome. With only a faint glow about his body Xander rose up off the ground ever so slowly and with a bit of instability but nevertheless her friend had once more proven himself capable of beating the odds. Still, her smile was big indeed as Xander managed to ascend three feet into the air before coming to a stop, though whether it was because he'd reached his limits or had chosen to stop she didn't know.

It was then that Xander opened his eyes and, for a few brief seconds, he was able to take in the fact that he could fly… before dropping to the ground most abruptly.

"O-kay… a little work needed on the landings but still… flight achieved." Xander said as he picked himself up off the ground.

"I wouldn't exactly call floating off the ground flying," Buffy pointed out from her observation position. "Still, VERY cool."

She couldn't have put it better herself.

 _ **Sunnydale High School, Xander's POV**_

 _So far, so good,_ he thought as he walked down the halls of the school. _Two days of school and no one's looked at me twice, much less called me on my pointed ears._

Indeed Giles' glamor amulet had been working out brilliantly and so things were pretty much back to normal for him as far as school went.

Well, as normal as life on the Hellmouth ever was.

He was on his way to meet with the others in the student lounge because apparently Buffy had something she wanted to discuss with him and Willow. The Slayer hadn't said what precisely it was but, when the killer of demons and vampires had something to say, it was generally in your best interests to listen.

Turning the corner he saw that, as he'd expected, both Willow and Buffy were waiting for him on one of the couches arrayed about the lounge. Both of them were talking animatedly about something but he was too far away to hear anything.

Despite what some might think, pointy ears did not equal improved hearing.

Striding up towards them, he determined that whatever they were gabbing it was so important that they didn't notice his arrival until he was right on top of them.

"I don't know. I don't think so. They seemed pretty friendly," Buffy said, sounding worried about whatever it was she'd seen.

"Who's friendly?" he asked as he sat down on the couch across from them.

"No one," Buffy replied a little too quickly for him not to be suspicious.

"Angel and a girl," Willow blurted out, much to the Slayers disapproval.

"Willow, do we have to be in total share mode?" Buffy asked, her voice ringing with the disapproval that was also on her face.

"Hey, it's me. If Angel's doing somethin' wrong, I wanna know. 'Cause it gives me a happy!"

"Mm, I'm glad someone has a happy," Buffy grumped before taking a sip of her soda.

"Aw, you just need cheering up," he said, not liking the moody look on her face. "And I know just the thing! Crazed dance party at the Bronze!"

"I dunno." Buffy said, sounding less than motivated.

"Very calm dance party at the Bronze?" he asked, hoping that it'd get a better response, only to see more of the same. "Moping at the Bronze?"

It was times like these that his dislike of the undead corpse reached an all-time high because, in his mind, causing Buffy to be all mopey was just another crime on top of indulging her romantic tendencies. If the man had even an inch of decency about him he'd crush her little 'Romeo and Juliet' fantasy and encourage her to date someone her own age, as well as with a pulse. Still, he knew it was pointless to try and bring it up in front of Willow and Buffy since they'd just fall back on the old 'you are just jealous' line.

"I'd suggest a box of Oreos dunked in apple juice, but maybe she's over that phase." Came an unfamiliar voice from their left.

Turning his head he saw a guy about the same age as him with dark hair and wearing an orange sleeveless shirt on top of a white short-sleeved shirt but he didn't recall ever seeing him around school before. This made him feel suspicious but it was when a look of recognition appeared on Buffy's face the suspicion lessened but did not vanish entirely.

"Ford?" Buffy asked as though she believed she couldn't quite accept what she was seeing.

"Hey, Summers!" 'Ford' said with a smile on his face.

As if they were old friends Buffy stood up and embraced the newcomer, hugging him tightly before letting him go.

"How ya been?" Ford asked, looking like he and Buffy had never stopped being friends.

"Oh, my God! What are you doing here?" Buffy asked, her face all smiles.

"Uh, matriculating." Ford replied after a moment's thought.

 _Typical guy tactic._ he thought with a mental roll of his eyes. _Use an intelligent sounding word to make yourself sound more mature than the rest of the guys._

"Huh?" Buffy asked, clearly not knowing the definition of the word.

He didn't either but was glad that the Slayer asked the question rather than him.

"I'm finishing out my senior year at Sunnydale High," Ford replied, looking at the Scoobies each in turn for a moment before returning to Buffy. "Dad got transferred."

"This is great!" Buffy exclaimed, sounding quite overjoyed at her old friend becoming the newest member of the student body.

"I'm glad you think so," Ford said, sounding like he approved of the response.

 _Definitely playing at something._

"I didn't think you'd remember me." Ford said, moving the conversation along.

"Remember you? Duh! We only went to school together for seven years," Buffy said as though forgetting Ford was impossible for her. "You were my giant fifth grade crush."

 _Great! It's not just her current choice of boyfriend I have to put up with but her old crush too!_

"So! You two know each other?" he asked, hoping to speed things alone to a more desired end.

"Oh!" Buffy said, as though realizing that she and Ford weren't the only people present all of a sudden. "I'm sorry. Um, this is Ford! Uh, Billy Fordham, this is Xander and Willow!"

"Hey!" Ford said, moving to take a place on the couch next to Buffy.

"Hi," he said, deciding he could at least be that polite.

"Nice to meet you!" Willow said, sounding quite happy to be learning something about Buffy's past.

"Uh, Ford and I went to Hemery together in L.A.," Buffy explained before turning to Ford. "And now you're here. For real?"

"Dad got the transfer and boom, he just dragged me outta Hemery and put me down here," Ford replied, definitely doing good putting on the 'I am an okay guy' façade.

"This is great! Well, I mean, it's hard, sudden move, all your friends, delicate time, very emotional, but let's talk about me!" Buffy said, trying to cover up her initial emotional outburst. "This is great!"

And failing. Badly.

"So, you two were sweeties in fifth grade?" Willow asked, clearly fishing for information.

"Not even. Ford wouldn't give me the time of day," Buffy replied, dismissing the notion.

"Well, I was a manly sixth-grader," Ford explained, never losing his smile. "I couldn't bother with someone that young."

"It was terrible," Buffy said, bemoaning her past at Hemery. "I moped over you for months. Sitting in my room listening to that Divinyl's song 'I Touch Myself'."

That caught his interest and also sent his mind a LITTLE into the gutter at the possible interpretations.

"Of course, I had no idea what it was about," Buffy said, trying to convince everyone present of that fact.

He couldn't help but smile and nod at the statement since it let him see the blonde from an angle he hadn't known existed until then.

"Hey, are you busy tonight?" Buffy asked her old friend. "There's this place, the Bronze, it's the local club, and you have to come."

A good enough reason to avoid going to the Bronze for a few nights if he ever heard one and the best part is he had no shortage of excuses to provide. He could say that he wanted to spend more time talking to Knotgrass, Flittle and the others, learning about his true mother. He could say that he wanted to get some magic practice in. Hopefully the novelty of Ford's return to Buffy's life will have worn off by then.

He hoped.

"I'd love to!" Ford said, sounding all for it before getting an awkward look on his face. "But if you guys already had plans… Would I be imposing?"

"No, only in the literal sense," he said, unable to check his mouth before speaking.

"Okay, then! I, I gotta find the admissions office." Ford said getting up off the couch. "Get my papers in order."

Definitely suspicious behavior and it's not just him seeing things.

"Well, you know what?" Buffy asked rhetorically before getting up from the couch. "I'll take you there, and I'll see you guys in French!"

With that the Slayer left with her old classmate, leaving only him and Willow in the student lounge alone together.

"Jeez! Doesn't she know any fat guys?" he muttered under his breath.

Luckily Willow missed that less than positive comment as she realized the hidden meaning of the song's title, going tomato red in the process. Not surprising considering her relatively innocent life she'd led and the fact that not everyone reacted to… acts of intimacy… the same way. Still, in a way he liked the fact that she reacted so because in a way it meant that she hadn't been changed in irreparable ways. He knew that having your parents being away from home so often couldn't have been easy for her and, after learning the truth about the world as well as choosing to fight against it… such things could change people in unfortunate ways.

As such every day that Willow remained as she'd always been since the day they met was one he treasured.

He knew it wouldn't last, not so long as she fought the good fight, but he would take what he could get for as long as he could get it.


	3. Adversity is the Mother of Invention

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the copyrighted material contained herein. They are the rightful property of their respective creators and/or associated companies. I make no profit from this whatsoever and I have no intention of changing this in the future. I write because it's fun and because there are those who enjoy reading my work.

 _ **The Bronze**_

 _ **Buffy's POV**_

She could tell that Xander wasn't overly enthused about hanging out Ford but she figured that was likely because the three of them with a close knit group that adding a new member was uncomfortable and unwelcome. Still, she was sure he'd get used to it and just because she was willing to welcome Ford as a friend it didn't mean she was going to let him know about her being the Slayer. He didn't deserve to be pulled into the dark world she visited every time she went on patrol. Already Willow was suffering ill effects of being in close proximity to her since, instead of being with the rest of them, thanks to her nighttime transformation into a gargoyle the redhead had to do everything she could to keep from being seen after the sun went down. Since Halloween that'd meant staying home with the curtains closed and the lights kept to a minimum so no one would see anything or suspect the truth.

Willow did her best to put up a brave front but she could tell that she had still not adjusted to her nighttime form or the transformation she underwent to gain it. Not that she could entirely be blamed for this since she'd be more than a little wierded out herself if she'd been afflicted with the problem herself. Still, she took comfort in the fact that Giles was on the job looking for a counter spell to fix the young genius so, until he succeeded, she'd do her best to keep her friend's spirits up. In fact, after she did a quick patrol of the cemeteries later, she'd go by Willow's place for an hour just to let her know she hadn't been forgotten.

"Your shot, Buff," Xander said, stepping to the side to allow her to make her move. "Just remember: restraint."

She rolled her eyes at this, remembering how the last time she'd played pool with Xander and Willow she'd accidently misjudged her strength sending one of the balls off the table. The only good thing about her embarrassing slip of control was the fact that the ball that went wild struck one of the more pompous jocks on the side of the head while he was putting the moves on a sophomore.

She considered it a lose-win moment.

It was after she successfully made her shot, without mishap she might add, that she looked up to see Ford stroll into the Bronze. She couldn't help but smile at this since she had good memories of her time at Hemery and some of them did involve Ford. She spoke the truth when she said she'd had a crush on him and, while she'd gotten over it well enough, you never quite forgot your first crush.

"Ford! You made it," she said once he was close enough that she didn't need to yell for him to hear her.

"Wasn't hard to find," Ford said coming to a stop next to the pool table. "Nice place."

"We like it," Xander said, sounding happy and not at all snarky like she'd expected. "Care to try your luck?"

"Sure but do you want me to wait?" Ford asked before gesturing to the scattered balls on the pool table. "I'd hate to interrupt your game."

"No biggy," she said, glad to have a restart. "It's not like it's a serious game or anything."

"Oh, I don't know, you were pretty serious a couple of minutes ago," Xander said with a grin on his face. "All measuring your shot, looking at all the angles and everything."

She just glared at him but only at the same level as a shoulder slap.

"Reminds me of your ninth grade beauty contest, Summers," Ford said, clearly enjoying this hint about her pool skills. "After all I heard quite a bit of talk about how long it took you to choose something for the swimsuit competition. Then, of course, when it was finally time to get on stage-"

"Oh, my God, Ford, stop that!" she ordered, giving him a stronger glare but feeling bits of humor sneaking into her. "The more people you tell, the more people I have to kill."

"You can't touch me, Summers," Ford said, sounding completely unafraid of repercussions. "I know all your darkest secrets."

"Care to make a small wager on that?"

Deciding she'd had enough of 'embarrass Buffy time' she put her pool stick downd, "I'm gonna go get a drink. Ford, try not to talk."

With that she left the two young men alone and, while she would've preferred that Willow had been there to keep anything too embarrassing from being talked about, that wasn't the case. She just hoped that Xander would show some restraint because otherwise she was going to have to dig up some blackmail material of her own in order to keep her secrets secret.

She was almost at the bar when out of the crowd came Angel, making her feel distinctly better than she had beforehand.

"Hi," she said, unable to think of anything better to open the conversation with.

"Hey!" he said, sounding like he was pleased to see her as well. "I was hoping you'd show."

She was about to say something when she noticed that she had a cup in his hand and it definitely had something in it from what she could see. This was completely contradictory to everything she knew about vampires so she just had to get some answers.

"You drink! I mean, drinks. Non-blood things," she said, not being able to articulate things quite right.

"There's a lot about me you don't know," Angel said, enjoying the fact that he knew things she didn't.

"I believe that," she said, unintentionally letting out a bit of bitterness as she remembered the little meeting he'd had with some unknown woman last night. "So. What'd you do last night?"

She couldn't help but ask and she would measure his response so she'd know whether to be more suspicious or less.

"Nothin'," Angel replied, doing a decent job of being casual but she was sure she spotted a bit of defensiveness in his tone.

"Nothing at all. You cease to exist?" she asked, making it clear she wanted more details than that.

"No, I mean I stayed in, read," he replied, still not telling her the truth.

Not surprising since a girlfriend could spot these sort of things in her man.

"Oh," she said, deciding that she didn't want to get too hostile here since it'd only cause a scene.

Instead she just turned around and led Angel back to where Xander and Ford looked to be ready to start another game of pool.

"Didn't want that soda after all?" Ford asked, noticing she'd returned without a drink.

"Not thirsty," she replied, divulging no more than that.

Xander nodded in Angel's direction but it was clear that that was about as civil as he intended to be towards the vampire. She personally wished that they got along better but realistically knew that that wasn't going to happen any time soon and definitely not without a great deal of work.

"Hi," Ford said, proving he could be a little more polite.

"This is Ford," she said, turning to face Angel. "We went to school together in L.A."

"Nice to meet you," Angel said, extending his hand for a shake with equal politeness.

"Whoa!" Ford said during the shake. "Cold hands!"

"You're not wrong," Xander said with a knowing look in his eyes.

She nailed him with a look that clearly said 'mind your manners'.

"So, you're here visiting Buffy?" Angel asked, trying to make the question sound casual.

"No, I'm actually here to stay," Ford said with minimal aggression. "Just moved down."

 _Oh great! Alpha male chest thumping!_ she thought, seeing that the two of them were revving up for.

Honestly it was something she should've seen coming but she was in no mood to put up with it if she could avoid it.

"Y'know, it's getting really crowded in here tonight," she said before turning to Ford. "Um… I'm a little hot. You wanna take a walk?"

"Um, sure! That'd be nice," Ford said, sounding a bit surprised at the invitation.

"Okay, then, um…" she said before turning to Xander and Angel. "I'll see all of you tomorrow."

With that she led Ford to the Bronze entrance and, once they were outside, hopefully she wouldn't have to deal with any more posturing and she could just spend the rest of the evening enjoying an old classmate's company.

 _ **The Rosenberg Home**_

 _ **Willow's Bedroom**_

 _ **Willow's POV**_

 _I don't know whether to be happy or sad that my parents are going to be a few days late coming home this time,_ she thought as she tried to use a comb to tame the wild hair she got every time she transformed. _I mean, it's a good thing since it'll give Giles more time to find the counter spell but kinda sad too since they're away often enough as it is._

Not that she held a grudge against them for it, though. She knew that they'd be home more if they could but their careers were very demanding and they had obligations that just couldn't be avoided without serious consequences. Considering the fact that they were the earning the money that paid for everything she owned as well as for her education, she could show at least a little lenience. Besides, they were fairly good at making it home in time for all the major holidays and her birthday, so it wasn't like she never saw them at all.

Besides, it was only a few extra days.

She could wait.

Of course a little voice in the back of her mind asked her what she planned on doing if Giles wasn't able to find a cure for her by the time her parents returned. After all, despite how learned the Watcher was, she knew that proper research took some time and that trying to get it done too quickly would only result in mistakes. Seeing as how Giles had been made Watcher to a Slayer, she could only presume that he'd made very few mistakes so he respected research enough to do it right. If finding a counter spell took longer than the few days, she had until her parents came back…

 _No. Don't think about it,_ she thought as she put her comb down. _Even if they do come back, they usually only stay for two or three days before going somewhere else. I just need to 'sleep over' at Buffy's place while they're here and they won't suspect a thing. If necessary I'll just say I need after school hours in the library for a project of mine. That'll be enough to keep my 'condition' a secret._

She felt oddly guilty about lying to her parents but she knew that coming straight out to them with the truth would be a mistake. After all, unlike her, they didn't know the truth about the world and while gargoyles weren't entirely unattractive in the cartoon, reality didn't quite match up to that. She'd looked at her nighttime form the second time it happened and was a little annoyed at how the animators of the cartoon had left out a significant amount of detail. For one thing the horns and spikes were not seamlessly integrated into the skin without any visible joining point. Instead they were like horns and spikes you'd find in normal animals in that they looked as though they pierced the flesh and that the flesh merely healed around them. In terms of color they did possess a faded variation on the blue skin tone she had as a gargoyle but only just to keep them from being labeled white. The talons on her digits were a little better since they appeared to be at the halfway point between human fingernails and talons found on birds.

This was a good thing since it meant that she could still use things like her computer or the house phone while in gargoyle form, though it did take some adjustment in her technique to avoid damaging anything. After all she'd confirmed to her satisfaction that she was indeed strong enough to crush solid stone and that her talons were sharp enough as well as durable enough to leave deep marks in them, so damaging stuff was easy if you were careless.

She'd been careless enough already with doorknobs and cupboard doors.

She really didn't need to add more suspicious damages or even more suspicious purchases to the credit card her parents had given her once she hit her teens. She used it as sparingly as she could and usually it was either for school supplies or the usual groceries every other week. So far she'd been able to pay for most of the damage she'd accidentally caused on her own using her own savings, but even that'd run out quick if she wasn't careful at night.

That was why she'd decided this afternoon that from here on out she'd try to get as much work done while she was still human during the day so she could minimize the possibility of accidental damage.

Tap, Tap.

Turning her head sharply, she looked at her window, unconsciously spreading her wings in response to a possible threat and only quick reflexes kept her lamp from getting knocked off the table. Gently putting it back where it belonged, she walked over to the window, with much less wobbling than in the beginning, parting the blinds to find the last person she expected there.

Angel.

Reflexively she tried to cover up because, despite her best efforts, the only clothes that worked for her in both her forms was a sports bra and spandex shorts she had. It'd been a birthday present her parents had gotten her last year when they'd thought she could use a little more exercise as well as time away from her computer. The bra was designed well enough that her wings were able to pop out without tearing through it and, with some improvised sewing, the shorts could now accommodate her tail.

Nevertheless it left her feeling more than a little exposed, even though it wasn't as bad as some of the things she'd seen girls wear at the beach.

Caping her wings over her body, something she'd practiced the first night after Halloween, she managed to conceal quite a bit but she still wanted Angel to go away as swiftly as she could manage.

"Angel!" she said after she opened the window. "What are you doing here?"

"I wanted to talk to you," Angel replied but without saying anything more.

Talk to her? Why?

Still, if he had his reasons, she should probably find out more so she gestured for him to invite her in. However, despite this invitation, the good vampire didn't do a thing.

"Well?" she said, not understanding why he wasn't accepting her invite.

"I can't. Unless you verbally invite me, I can't come in," Angel said, explaining his lack of action.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, internally criticizing herself for not connecting the dots. "Well, okay, I invite you. To come in."

Walking away from the window, she went to her closet and immediately pulled out her bathrobe, utilizing it as best she could to cover up more. Even with her wings caped she couldn't put it over them so instead she wrapped it around her waist like a skirt and looked with satisfaction as it covered everything down to here ankles.

"I-if this is a bad time, I-" Angel said after noticing her discomfort.

"N-no! It's just I'm not supposed to have boys in my room and…" she said, trying to put him at ease, "…I'm still not entirely used to… looking like this."

"I promise to be on my best behavior," Angel said with a reassuring grin.

"What do you need?" she asked, figuring that speeding things up would be good for both of them.

"I need your help," Angel replied, taking on a more cautious disposition. "I want you to track someone down. On the 'net."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, glad that it was something she could handle easily enough. "Great! I'm so the 'net girl."

Going over to the desk she used for schoolwork she started booting up her computer.

"I just wanna find everything I can," Angel said, conveying his intentions. "Records, affiliates, I'm not even sure what I'm looking for yet."

When her computer finished booting up she brought up the customized web browser she'd programmed and went to the search engine.

"Good. What's the name?" she asked, ready to begin sifting through the internet.

"Billy Fordham," Angel replied with utmost seriousness.

What? Was this some sort of jealousy thing? If it was Angel was definitely taking things a couple of steps further than Xander.

"Uh, Angel?" she asked, deciding to gently try to push aside the man's jealousy. "If I say something you REALLY don't wanna hear, do you promise not to bite me?"

"Are you gonna tell me that I'm jealous?" Angel asked, sounding like he'd expected a reaction like this.

"Well, you do sometimes get that way," she replied, hoping he didn't get angry.

"You know, I never used to," Angel said as he moved over to sit on her bed. "Things used to be pretty simple. A hundred years, just hanging out, feelin' guilty…I really honed by brooding skills. Then she comes along. Yeah, I get jealous. But I know people. And my gut tells me something is wrong with this guy."

She had to admit that, as old as Angel was, he would have gained quite a bit of experience reading people and his vampire senses would've only made it that much easier. So with only a little reluctance she began to look for information on Buffy's old classmate from L.A., starting with anything in the last year or so. If she found nothing suspicious in that timeframe she'd go further back until she either hit pay dirt or the info was too old to be useful.

"Okay…" she said as the information began to scroll up the screen, "but if there isn't anything weird… hey, that is weird."

She'd decided to start somewhere close by so she hacked into Sunnydale High School's computers to access Ford's records but, even though she was looking at the top ten most recent additions, there was no sign of the dark haired young man. She kept looking, searching other sections of the school database in case whoever was in charge was being lazy, but all she got was the same nothing as before.

"What is it?" Angel asked, sounding very interested.

"I just checked the school records and he's not in them," she said, turning halfway towards the vampire. "I mean, usually they transfer your grades and stuff, but he's not even registered."

"He said he was in school with you guys, right?" he asked, obviously looking to build on that discrepancy.

"Let me just see if I can find out more," she replied even as she began to expand her search past Sunnydale High School. "It'll take some time, though."

"I'll come by tomorrow after sunset," Angel said, looking like he wasn't willing to push her to work quicker.

"No problem," she said, figuring that between her free period at school tomorrow plus the time she'd have after nightfall she'd have more for him by then.

"Don't tell Buffy what we're doing, alright?" Angel asked, sounding a little worried about what might happen if the Slayer found out.

She had a fairly good idea and didn't relish having to endure it any more than Angel was but nodded to show him that she'd keep quiet. Until she had more than missing school records it would be foolish and useless to talk to Buffy about her old friend.

Watching Angel as he left the same way he came, she began to ponder the possibility that Ford was indeed up to something and wondered what it could be. You only did something in secret if you thought telling people about it would make accomplishing it impossible. What could Ford be up to that he thought Buffy would stop if she knew?

Something bad. Perhaps something VERY bad.

With that in mind she worked all the harder to find even the smallest wrinkle in Ford's digital paper trail because if the teenager was up to no good and it involved Buffy, she was going to put an end to it.

Using whatever means proved necessary to keep her first real gal pal safe from harm.

 _ **An Alleyway in Sunnydale**_

 _ **The Following Night**_

 _ **Xander's POV**_

Seeing the sign 'The Sunset Club', he had a bad feeling about what they'd find inside.

While he was willing to admit that it was possible the owner had chosen the name for how it sounded rather than for any hidden meaning, he knew that things on the Hellmouth were rarely that innocent.

"The only thing I could track down was this address. The Sunset Club," Willow said as she walked beside him and Deadboy, her wings caped around her shoulders. "Still didn't find anything incriminating."

"He leaves no paper trail, no records; that's incriminating enough." Angel said as they continued towards the entrance to the club.

"Yeah, I'm gonna have to go with Deadboy on this one," he said even if he didn't like the little story he'd been told.

Apparently Lord Forehead had gotten so jealous about how Buffy acted around Ford that he'd stopped by Willow's house and asked her to do some digging into the former Hemery student's background. While he wasn't as worried as he might have otherwise been thanks to the fact that he knew his best bud was strong enough to tear the vamp limb from limb, he still didn't like the image of the corpse being in her room. The whole invitation clause thing was one of the few things that eased his mind when his imagination pictured how things'd turn out if the demons began targeting Scoobies. While it was true an invite from one vamp didn't extend to the entire undead species, he didn't trust Angel but rather tolerated him because of Willow and Buffy. He knew that if he got too antagonistic or started talking about staking the brooding wonder, they'd vehemently oppose him while slinging words like 'jealous' at him.

No thank you!

"Could you NOT call me that?" Angel asked, clearly annoyed at the nickname.

He just smiled one of his usual smiles because, while he might not be able to outright call for the souled vamp's head without reprisal, the girls offered him a lot more leeway when it came to name calling or wisecracks.

"I'm gonna knock," Deadboy said before looking at Willow. "You should probably get on the rooftop across from the entrance. You'll… stand out too much if you come with us."

He had to narrow his eyes a bit at Angel pointing out Willow's inhuman form like that but his anger was tempered a bit by the fact that he had to acknowledge that a gargoyle would turn more than a few heads inside. This was a reconnaissance mission rather than something more direct and that meant not giving anyone inside the club a reason to make them think the 'newbies' were suspicious. With slightly hurt eyes Willow nodded before walking over to the brick wall and beginning her climb to the rooftop, digging her talons in with periodic crunching. Once Lord Forehead was sure the female gargoyle was out of sight he knocked on the entrance to the club and soon after the viewport slid open to reveal human eyes.

"We're friends of Ford's," Deadboy said, smartly using the name of someone who was a regular to facilitate entry.

Once he and Angel were inside, though, he could immediately tell that not sticking out like sore thumbs was not going to be an option for them. While Deadboy's outfit might allow him to blend a bit, it wasn't perfect and his own preference for Hawaiian shirts made him stand out.

"In no way do we stick out in this crowd," he said as he did his best not to attract more attention then his clothes probably already were.

"Let's look around," Angel said after glancing around a bit. "You check downstairs. I'll stay up here."

"Sure thing, mon capitan!" he said with a bit of snark even though he did as asked and descended down some stairs to the lower level of the club.

Once he reached the bottom of the stairs he just looked about, casually evaluating everything he saw to try and figure out what Ford was up to. While a lot of the clothes were all Victorian era, that didn't narrow down the genre all that much but, when he found a man in a coffin dressed like a Hollywood vampire, he got a BIG clue.

"Hi," the man in the coffin said with a wave of his hand.

He waved back but in his head he jumped to the most likely conclusion and it didn't sit well with him at all: this was a vamp fan club! He couldn't help but feel disgust at the people surrounding him for idolizing the things that'd killed Jesse and who knew how many others over the past millennia. How anyone could see them as anything other than monsters he didn't know but he did know he didn't want to stay in the club longer than he absolutely had to.

"You're new here, aren't you?" a blonde girl said, approaching him in a dark blue dress with black lace trim. "I can tell."

"Nah!" he said, trying to sound like the idea was preposterous. "I come here all the time. I just left my Phantom costume at home this time."

While he was tempted to admit to being new, he thought the girl might be a little more open if she could be fooled into believing he was a regular.

"Don't be ashamed!" the girl said with a welcoming smile on her face. "It's cool that you're open to it. We welcome anyone who's interested in the Lonely Ones."

"The Lonely Ones?" he asked even though he figured he knew what the term was referring to.

"Vampires," Angel said, popping out of nowhere and damn near making him jump.

 _That is IT! I'm putting a bell around Deadboy's neck ASAP and to hell with what the others think!_ "Oh! We usually call them the nasty, pointy, bitey ones."

He couldn't keep the anger, hate really, from seeping into his words and the fact that the blonde girl took on the expression of an enlightened person taking pity on the uninformed didn't help.

"So many people have that misconception. But they who walk with the night are not interested in harming anyone," the blonde girl said, almost gushing with adulation. "They are creatures above us. Exalted!"

"You're a fool," Angel stated, not sugarcoating his words in the least.

"Ya know, I never thought I'd ever say this but I agree with you one hundred percent," he said, almost wanting to spit to get the foul taste of the words out of his mouth. "The IQs of these people make Larry and his crew look like Einsteins."

"You don't have to be so confrontational about it," tThe blonde said with annoyance and perhaps a bit if indignation. "Other viewpoints than yours may be valid, you know."

With that the girl strode away, leaving him with Deadboy standing by his side looking about as impressed with the club goers as he was.

"I've seen enough. I've seen these sorts of people before," Angel almost growled as he shook his head in sharp disbelief. "I mean, they're children making up bedtime stories of friendly vampires to comfort themselves in the dark."

"I blame Hollywood, personally," he said as he began to head back to the entrance to the club. "When monster movies started taking a dive at the box office they probably thought 'HEY! Let's try to sell Dracula and the Wolfman as angsty and broody people you just want to take into your arms and hug'. Bet a lotta people that wind up getting eaten actually believing that shit."

Then he remembered the routine Deadboy usually used and how it had affected Buffy and Willow.

"Good thing I've got the mojo now so I can keep Buff and Willow off the menu," he said as he began to climb up the steps. "Any vamp tries to pull that crap on them, I'm gonna turn'em into roaches just so I can personally step on them."

He didn't look back to see if Deadboy had picked up on the hidden meaning behind his words but hoped that least some of the message had gotten through. While he couldn't quite claim that he thought the vamp was faking his 'souled corpse seeking redemption' routine, seeing as it'd been going on for a while, that didn't mean he'd thrown out the possibility of a future backstab. He didn't know the particulars of why Angel was acting different from every other vamp he'd ever encountered but it was unnatural in his mind.

Unnatural things only stuck around until Mother Nature came along and removed them from the equation somehow.

He hoped he'd have front row seats for when Angel was removed from the equation.

 _ **Buffy's POV**_

Life sucked.

That was the only conclusion she could come to after what'd happened in the last twenty-four hours and, if someone else had been through the things she had, she doubted they'd be able to disagree. First she'd found out a vampire that Ford, someone she'd considered her friend as well as her first crush, had claimed he'd killed was not and was quite spry for a pile of ash. Then there was the fact that Angel finally came clean about the girl she'd seen him with the night before and it turned out to be worse than she'd been expecting it to be. She'd thought that Drusilla had been an old vamp flame, someone Angel had dated way back when, and so her feelings for him had flared up with a desire to get some answers. The truth was that back when Angel had been bad, he'd gone through the mind torture handbook page by page before going for the big finale inside a convent by turning Drusilla into the vampire she was today.

She hadn't liked that.

Oh, she had known in the back of her mind that Angel hadn't always been the dark and mysterious ally that tugged at her heartstrings but she'd never really paid any attention to his bad old days. To her they were unimportant because he wasn't that guy anymore and had been doing his best to help her out at the risk of his own life. It's why she'd always been quick to anger whenever Xander had gotten too sharp with his comments because she couldn't understand why her second friend since coming to Sunnydale couldn't tell the difference between the vamps they slayed and Angel. The vamps they dusted got off on killing people, on doing things that would make most sane people throw up just thinking about them, but Angel got angry at what the other members of the undead were doing. The man she had feelings for was doing everything he could to atone for his past and help them protect the citizens of Sunnydale, if not the entire human population of the planet Earth.

Surely that at least warranted giving Angel the benefit of a doubt, right?

The main reason she'd given Xander some slack was the fact that the guy had lost his best bud to the vamps her first week in Sunnydale. It was hard those times when you arrived too late to a vamp attack to save the victim but it was even harder to watch someone you cared about die. Merrick might've only been her Watcher for a couple of months but you didn't spend quality time with someone training and not form some connections. He'd been the one to lay the foundation for the type of Slayer she was now and she doubted that she'd have survived Lothos if he hadn't been there for her. She'd gotten her revenge when she'd finally slain the master vampire but that didn't make the pain of Merrick's death go away or the anger she felt towards vampires and demons in general. Thus she could understand how Xander couldn't just set aside his hatred of vampires but he could come a little further in tolerating Angel.

Now, though… now she had to deal with the possibility that Ford had done more than simply lie to her.

That was the second thing that'd soured her mood for today.

According to Angel, her 'old friend' was connected to a club for vamp fanboys and fangirls, making the lie about dusting the female vamp all the more suspicious. If there was one thing she knew, being a fangirl herself about certain things, it was that nothing was desired more by those sort of people than getting as close to their idols as possible. For some that just meant wearing the same kind of clothing and makeup but for others it evolved into a desire to change themselves physically. She'd overheard more than a few girls at her old high school that'd tried to convince their parents to let them go under the plastic surgeon's knife to tweak their nose or their cheekbones. They'd wanted so badly to become like the people they idolized that they wanted to change their facial features so that they could be just that one step closer. Most of those girls bombed in their efforts since their parents weren't crazy enough to spend thousands of dollars on such a venture but a few managed to disguise their desires enough to make their parents see their point of view, albeit without knowing it.

The fact that their idols inevitably went from being the 'in thing' to being passé didn't do great things for the reputations of those girls, either.

If Ford really was one of those vamp fanboys and had been willing to let one of them get away and then lie about dusting it, then she could only conclude that he wanted to take his devotion to the next level. Whether that meant becoming a human lackey to some vamp crew in Sunnydale or… something worse, she didn't know. It had been the not knowing that'd caused her to meet up with Ford a short while ago to see if she could look at him and spot the signs of someone preparing to betray her. She'd been so good at it back at Hemery when it was important to know if someone really wanted to be friends with you or was just setting you up to take a big fall. All throughout their conversation she'd looked as closely as she could without giving herself away but hadn't been able to conclusively say yes or no to the question of whether Ford was planning to stab her in the back. In the end, when he'd asked her out for another night on the town, she'd decided to play along with the idea of getting more clues to help her reach a conclusion about her first crush.

Trotting down the stairs to the ground level of the school, she spotted Xander and Willow sitting down on the second flight looking like they were doing some thinking of their own. She couldn't help the flare of anger at the two for going behind her back to investigate Ford but it was tempered by the fact that they'd done so out of a desire to protect her. Put in their position, she could honestly say she'd probably have done the same thing but it still raised trust flags within her mind.

"Buffy!" Willow exclaimed, noticing her approach and standing up immediately.

For a moment she thought about simply making up some lame excuse and walking away but she decided that she needed to get the whole secret investigation thing out of the way. As long as they didn't settle things, it'd always been a road bump in their friendship and she had too few friends in Sunnydale to let that happen.

"Did, uh, Angel-" Willow began to ask, looking quite uncomfortable about what she'd done and wary of the potential blow up.

"He told me everything," she said, confirming that she knew what the redhead had done.

"I'm sorry we kept stuff from you," Willow declared, sounding quite remorseful about what she'd done at Angel's request.

"It's okay," she said, trying to smile reassuringly but not quite managing it thanks to the turmoil caused by her still unanswered Ford questions.

"When Angel came to my room he was just really concerned for you and we didn't wanna say anything in case we were wrong," Willow explained, trying to help with the understanding of her actions.

"Did you find out what Ford is up to?" Xander asked, sounding like he wanted to be kept up to date on the situation.

"I will," she said before striding off with a plan developing in her mind.

She knew it was a bit rude just to walk off like that but she knew the more her battle plan formed in her mind, the harder it would be to conceal that planning from her friends. They'd hung out enough that they'd be able to get a clue or two from her face and how she was acting to figure out that she was planning something.

She couldn't let that happen.

The basic plan that was forming in her mind was chock full of risks and could potentially backfire if she slipped up. A voice in her head that sounded a lot like Giles was telling her to wait and to come up with a sound plan but she ignored it. The sun was out at the moment and that meant the vamps were in their lairs rather than at this Sunset Club, providing her with a window of opportunity to confront her 'old friend' about what he was doing. So long as the vamps weren't there, she could handle a bunch of touched in the head teenagers with delusions about the undead residents of Sunnydale. With a little bit of luck she'd be able to convince them of the sheer insanity of their devotion and get them to abandon their little vampire fan club.

And she could get some answers from Ford about why he was trying to set her up.

 _ **The Sunset Club**_

 _ **Ford's POV**_

"Chantarelle, is everything ready?" he asked as he came down the stairs to the club's lower floor.

"Of course it's ready!" Diego declared, apparently not getting the hint that being ignored should've conveyed. "Hey, I took care of it, like I always do!"

"Is it time? Tonight?" Chantarelle asked, looking a little uneasy.

Not all that surprising considering that in her mind she was on the verge of changing species and living forever as a 'Lonely One'. Heh. He still couldn't help but chuckle on the inside at the sheer stupidity of the sheep he'd managed to gather in such a short period of time. Contrary to what Summers might think, he hadn't flown into this plan completely blind; he'd done his research, so he knew that those that got turned into vamps quickly lost whatever empathy they might've had for normal humans. Not that he could blame them because, when you got super strength, speed, agility, a healing factor and numerous other gifts upon turning, normal humans went from being equals to lower life forms. You didn't treat your food as an equal after all and so he'd had to dangle quite a big carrot in front of the lady vamp Drusilla he managed to track down. She was mad as a hatter but she was the only big player in town and he refused to be converted by a random member of the vampire rabble. He'd promised her that he'd serve up the Slayer plus a room full of mindless sheep in return for turning him into a vampire. It'd been a little difficult making out whether or not her reply was a 'yes' given how she spoke but he'd decided that her smile and order to continue with his plan was a good sign.

"You nervous?" he asked as he poured the three of them some wine.

"Yes. No. I'm ready for the change," Chantarelle replied, obviously having a tough time settling on an answer. "Do you really think they'll bless us?"

"I know they will," he lied as he handed her one of the goblets, leaving Diego to get his own. "Everything's falling into place."

"What about your friends?" Diego asked, determined to be an annoyance. "Are they coming?"

"What are you talking about?" he asked, not quite sure what the idiot meant.

"Your friends. They came last night," Diego replied, elaborating on his earlier questions. "Two guys."

"They were both very mean to me," Chantarelle said, sounding a little put out by the memory.

Thinking back over the time he'd spent outside of the club, he tried to recall if he'd recruited any more sheep to the banquet or met anyone who'd know his name and might've followed him here. No, no additional sheep, but there had been two men who might've managed to track him down here. Xander and Summers' older guy friend, Angel with the cold hands. One had definitely not been a fan of his and, considering the moves he'd been putting on Buffy, the other one might've gotten jealous enough to do some digging. With the countdown he'd been forced to work with he hadn't been able to cover his tracks or hide his involvement with the club, so it wouldn't have been difficult to find the place. This wasn't how he'd planned it but he could adapt with the best of them and had already thought up some contingencies in order to make sure he got what he wanted.

Still, he had an act to keep up so...

"Oh, Christ!" he exclaimed, pretending to be angry. "Why didn't you tell me about this sooner?"

"I have to do everything around here?" Diego asked rhetorically and with annoyance. "Sorry, Mister Flawless Plan Guy, it slipped my mind!"

"It's gonna be alright, isn't it?" Chantarelle asked, sounding like she thought this might endanger the plan.

It wouldn't.

"It's gonna be fine!" he said, releasing his anger and putting on his 'trust me' smile.

"No. It's really not," a voice said from the second level, causing everyone to look towards it.

 _Plan B confirmed. Time to get it moving,_ he thought before he turned to Diego. "It's kinda drafty in here."

Fortunately the idiot was still smart enough to recognize the code word for what it was AND keep his movements from being anything other than casual. Now all he had to do was keep Summers focused on him and oblivious to everything else. Thankfully it looked like his 'old friend' had not changed that much from her days in L.A. so he didn't think he'd have to work too hard.

"I'm sorry, Ford. I just couldn't wait till tonight!" Buffy said with clearly false cheer as she walked down the stairs. "I'm rash and impulsive. It's a flaw."

 _Playing the wisecracking hero role to the hilt,_ he thought with a smile. "We all have flaws."

"I'm still a little fuzzy on exactly what yours is," she said as she finally reached where he was standing. "I think it has to do with being a lying scumbag."

He felt a little anger in him rise but he didn't let it seep into his words. "Everybody lies," he said, not giving her any more than he wanted her to have.

"What do you want, Ford? What's this all about?" she asked him, sounding like she expected her dominating personality to make him fold and spill everything.

"I really don't think you'd understand," he replied, knowing this would just wind her up more.

"I don't need to understand," she said, making it clear she wasn't going to stop until she got answers. "I just need to know."

"I'm gonna be one of them," he said as he moved another of his mental chess pieces into place.

"You wanna be a vampire?" she asked, sounding like 'does not compute' was flashing in her mind at the moment.

"I'm going to," he said honestly, making his resolve clear since it'd help with the performance.

"You know, vampires are a little picky about who they change ov…" she said before a metaphorical light bulb went off in her brain. "You were gonna offer them a trade!"

 _Guess she's gotten a little smarter since she left Hemery,_ he thought before turning away. "I don't think I wanna talk anymore."

Predictably she went straight to the default tool of Slayers and grabbed him by the throat, shoving him against the pillar that'd been close by.

Just like he'd choreographed.

"Yeah, well, I still feel awfully chatty!" she said, clearly angry at being made a sacrifice to his ambitions. "You were gonna give them me! Tonight!"

"Yes," he said with a nod, not seeing the point in denying it at this point.

"You had to know I'd figure it out," she said, sounding like she really thought she'd gotten the drop on him by arriving early.

Idiot.

"Actually, I was counting on it," he said as he smiled in response to his plan falling into place like clockwork.

She let him go and, to keep up with his role, he reflexively massaged his throat like any character would do after being manhandled like he'd just been.

"What's supposed to happen tonight?" she asked, likely wanting to know so she could do something to screw it up.

"This is SO cool!" he exclaimed with a victorious smile. "It's just like how it played in my head. You know that part where you ask me what's supposed to happen?" He laughed an actual laugh. "It's already happening."

With that Diego finally shut the inner door of the club with a loud clang and, just like he'd predicted, Summers raced back up the stairs to try and open it. When opening it the normal way failed to be an option she started pounding on it in the hopes her Slayer strength could punch a hole through it. Not going to happen.

"Rigged up special. Once it's closed, it can only be opened from the outside," he explained just in case the bottle blonde couldn't connect the dots. "As soon as the sun sets, they'll be comin'."

"Ford, if these people are still around when they get here…" she said, predictably trying to appeal to his humanity.

Too bad he didn't really care about such a thing or any of the sheep around him at the moment.

"We'll be changed. All of us," Diego said, sounding actually happy rather than annoyed.

"We're going to ascend to a new level of consciousness!" Chantarelle declared, making it clear that she was about as smart as her hair color stereotypically implied. "Become like them. The Lonely Ones."

"This is the end, Buffy," he said, saying his closing lines for this act. "No one gets outta here alive."

 _ **Sunnydale High School**_

 _ **Willow's POV**_

"Have you seen Buffy?" she asked, her voice full of worry.

"Not since she forgave us for investigating Ford behind her back," Xander replied as he came to a stop before her in the library. "She's got some major mad karma heading her way thanks to Snyder for skipping afternoon classes."

"She's got bigger problems than that if she did what I think she did and went where I think she went," she said as the little facts she'd managed to dig up in Miss Calendar's computer class were true. "We gotta go and we gotta go! NOW!"

"Let's arm up first," he said before going over to the weapons cage and unlocking it.

She felt happy that her best friend trusted her enough to follow her lead without asking questions. Normally she would've encouraged his more inquisitive and information seeking desires since knowledge was definitely something that should be sought out whenever possible. While it might be impossible to know everything, every little bit you did learn increased the number of things you could do with your life. The more options you had, the more you could accomplish and the more good you could do for those you cared about as well as humanity at large.

"Aaahhh! Goddamit!" Xander cried out before dropping a spiked mace to the floor. "This being part Fae is way more painful than I thought it'd be when I chose to go out as Puck for Halloween."

"At least you don't have to worry about feeling like you're being put through a weed wacker every sunrise and sunset," she said as she reached down to pick up the mace. "Plus having to worry about shredding your clothes isn't fun either."

"Guess not but for what mine cost it wouldn't be a big deal to replace'em," he said as he chose an axe with a wooden handle having learned from his previous mistake.

After tucking two wooden stakes in their pockets along with a cross and a few bottles of holy water, they ran out of the school as quickly as they could, setting course for the Sunset Club.

"Do you think we should've waited for Giles?" she asked offhand as they continued to make for their friend's hypothesized position. "Strength in numbers and stuff?"

"You heard the announcement," he replied as they turned a corner. "Snyder pulled in all the teachers for a faculty meeting. Unless you know of a good enough excuse to get G-man out of it, we're on our own."

As much as she didn't want to admit it, her friend and love interest had a point. Snyder was ten times more unreasonable than Flutie had been when it came to listening to students or cutting anyone some slack. Even when you had what to you was an airtight argument for or against something, the troll of a man just ignored you, abusing his authority just so he could smirk smugly down upon you. Trying to get Giles out of the faculty meeting would've been impossible and likely would've only gotten her and Xander into trouble right alongside Buffy, even if they hadn't skipped afternoon classes. Nevertheless, she had to wonder if they'd be able to save Buffy from whatever Ford had planned on their own.

The reason she'd been so worried for Buffy and gone to Xander was the fact that, during Miss Calendar's class, she'd done a bit more research into the location of the Sunset Club. She'd figured it'd be useful if they needed to know where all the ways in and out were located. However it was during this process that she'd learned that the club used to be a bomb shelter built during the early days of the Cold War and that meant that the walls were three feet thick of solid concrete, reinforced as well, with only one way in or out made out of metal thick enough that it'd probably take Buffy hours to pound her way out of, if she managed to escape at all. Couple that with the theme of the club and Ford's deceptive activities… the sooner they rescued Buffy, the better because in less than twenty minutes the sun was going to disappear and the vamps would come out. She was certain that Ford's plan had something to do with turning Buffy over to the vampires but she still couldn't figure out what the doody head's endgame was. What was he getting out of the situation?

 _Doesn't matter,_ she thought with a determined look on her face. _He's trying to get one of my friends killed. I WON'T let that happen!_

It was a little over ten minutes later that they arrived at the entrance to the club and thankfully found out that the outer door wasn't locked. Bringing her mace up into a ready position just as Xander brought his axe up, they crept towards the inner door that'd lead them to the main club area. If Ford was any kind of planner he'd have put guards on either side of the door in order to make sure any reinforcements Buffy got were stopped. She was disappointed as they finally arrived at their destination to find no guards at all. Just the door needed to access the club's interior.

"You know someone needs to read 'The Evil Overlord' handbook when they don't even put minion guards in front of the door," Xander said with half mocking disappointment. "Sloppy."

"We'll be sure to leave him a note," she said as she reached out with her hand to open the door.

Walking in they could see the gathered vampire wannabes and off to the right was Buffy standing opposite Ford, looking quite put out while the latter had an angry expression of entitlement on his face. She'd seen similar expressions on many of her fellow classmates who felt they should be treated especially well because they came from rich families or were star athletes. She didn't know what justification Ford was using but it didn't matter to her because they were putting a stop to this nonsense right now.

"Okay everybody! Party's over!" Xander said, entering the room while using his axe to intimidate a path towards Buffy. "We'll be taking our friend back now and if even one of you has a bit of common sense, you'll find someplace else to be. Someplace a little more intelligent and less pandering towards necrophilia."

Following closely behind her friend, she did her best to look threatening with her spiked mace and it seemed to work best when she tried to direct a Demona face at them.

"Hey, Buff'" Xander said, arriving at the Slayer's side. "How's the party so far?"

"Not what I thought it'd be," Buffy replied, sounding a mix of sad and angry. "Turns out Ford's got a brain tumor and plans on serving up everyone but him up to the vamps just so he won't die leaving behind a less than handsome corpse."

Hearing this she had to admit that she felt a little sympathetic towards Ford since she knew all too well from her studies the toll that chemotherapy and other tumor treatments took on the human body. It wasn't a pleasant process in the least especially since it at best bought the afflicted person extra time rather than curing the problem outright. Still, she also felt anger like Buffy because, in her mind, nothing justified sacrificing others just so you could live on, especially when being turned into a vampire wasn't gaining immortality but rather handing over your body to a blood demon.

In short he was sacrificing his own life and the lives of the rest of the club patrons for nothing but adding another vampire to the multitude that already lived in Sunnydale.

Looking to Xander, she saw very little of the compassion both she and Buffy no doubt felt for Ford and instead anger dominated her best friend's features.

"So it wasn't enough you had to stoop to worshipping those monsters!" Xanger growled, an eerie green glow beginning to manifest lightly in his eyes. "You actually want to become one of them! You're actually willing to lead all these idiots to their deaths just so you can be turned! Screw you! Buffy, let's just get the rest of these idiots out of here and leave Ford to face his new pals when they get here. Bet they'll be real miffed to find nothing on their dinner plates."

"Sounds like a plan to me," Buffy said, sounding like she was actually okay with leaving her old friend at the mercy of whatever vampire Ford had managed to make a deal with. "Of course there's just the little problem of convincing them to leave while it was still light out. I've been trying to tell them they're making a big mistake but they won't listen. Keep going on and on that they know more about vampires than I do."

"Uh huh," Xander said with a roll of his eyes. "Bet they believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, too. Bet they have the same kind of proof about those two that they do vamps. Movies, cartoons and fantasy novels with all of them written by people who've probably never laid eyes on a real vampire in their entire lives."

"We could just leave ourselves. Then they'll get the truth shoved right in their faces whether they want it or not," she said, hoping her theory that her friends were just acting to scare the club goers into leaving. "They won't be able to lie to themselves then."

"Yeah, but then they'll die a minute or so after getting the truth and then it'll be kinda pointless, Willow," Xander pointed out with a pondering expression on his face.

"I guess you're right," she conceded with seriousness almost spoiled by amusement at their little charade. "Vampires don't really bother with safe words or anything like that."

In an instant she realized what she'd said in her moment of enjoyment and had to fight to keep herself from blushing with embarrassment.

Fortunately the blonde girl who'd approached them during the last visit with Angel chose to get involved, keeping her friends from inquiring about her choice of words.

"You're not going anywhere!" the blonde declared, trying to sound determined but cracking along the edges. "The Lonely Ones won't turn us unless they get her so get her they will!"

"Miss Edith says the pretty little girl is so nice to want to help Mummy," came a voice that she didn't recognize but that positively hummed with insanity.

Everyone looked towards the source of the voice and she was shocked to see a dark haired young woman that closely matched Buffy's description of the girl she'd seen Angel with. What made things even worse, though, was the fact that behind this young woman was a trio of vampires in their game faces, all of whom looked like they were ready for their evening meals.

"But it's not sunset yet!" she exclaimed before she could stop herself even as she checked her watch.

Six twenty pm.

According to what she found online sunset wasn't supposed to be for another seven minutes and, unless the vampires had camped right next door to the club, it should've taken them at least five minutes to get here.

"Foolish little tree," the insane vampiress said with a smile. "Nasty sun can't touch the dark places. Places that grow as it falls down to the ground. We must simply be mindful of where we step."

While she might not have been fluent in crazy person speech, she figured out enough to know that the vampiress had just taken a route where she and her followers wouldn't stray into direct sunlight. With shadows that grew as the sun set there had to be many alleyways that'd opened up to them and then in a moment she considered the sewer tunnels that crisscrossed Sunnydale. It soon became clear that the daytime was not the safe place she'd originally thought it was if vampires could still travel about if they were smart about it.

Xander summed it up nicely.

"Well shit."

 _ **Xander's POV**_

"All of mummy's boys and girls can have their fun but the naughty Slayer and her winged tree friend are mine," the vamp lady said with a British accent before a cross expression appeared. "We shall be most cross with anyone who forgets this."

The vamps displayed what brain cells they had by nodding in agreement before flooding into the club, heading for any and every human they set their eyes on. As much as he might not like them for their devotion, he was pretty sure that they were revising their fealty at the moment and that meant he had to save their lives. The only problem with that was that, even with Giles' help, he hadn't made much progress with learning to master his magic. He had levitation down pat but not to the point where he was confident that he could fly without risking a nasty fall. As for the rest… Giles seemed pretty determined to take things slow so it'd probably be a long while before he learned how to change one thing into another in the blink of an eye or teleport.

 _Too bad, 'cause it'd be real handy to be able to 'port everyone but Ford to safety right now._

Seeing one after another of the club patrons become a meal for the undead, he decided that the time for taking it slow had come to an end. He would not stand by and let the idiots die when he had at least the ability to TRY and save them. Calling forth his magic, he levitated himself into the air, drawing the attention of both vampire and human alike, buying himself a couple of seconds to come up with a rhyme to guide his power.

Thank GOD for his active imagination and his ability to work well under pressure.

"Idiots and fools thou wish to hurt, to bring cold death with which they did flirt," he chanted while mentally willing into existence the form he wished the spell to take. "Deprived though I may be of sun's holy light, from the undead I take your treasured sight!"

When he felt his magic reach its peak he released it so it could do what he hoped it would and was not disappointed as the energy lit up the room even as the vampires cried out in pain as they reflexively reached for their eyes. However, in the place of the human eyes with unholy golden irises there was naught but emerald light filling the sockets, proving itself incapable of letting the undead corpses see the world around them. With the sudden shock the bloodsuckers unintentionally let go of their prey, causing both teenage boy and girl to scramble away from those they now saw unmistakably as monsters. Some had gotten away with only scratches but others would need medical care if they didn't want to die of blood loss within the next half hour.

"Clear the area around the door, guys!" he said even as he reached out with his ability to levitate objects to seize the teenagers who looked to be in the direst need of medical help. "We gotta get these people out of here! I don't know how long that spell's gonna last!"

His friends didn't hesitate as they fought their way to the door, staking or bashing vamps as they went in order to reduce the number they'd have to deal with upon reaching the door. What he had planned was ambitious indeed but it was the only thing he could think of that stood a chance of getting the club patrons out of the building and to the hospital anytime soon. With every dusted or disabled vamp, though, his hopes rose even as he did his best to maintain the focus needed to keep those in his grip on the club patrons. It was all looking great, like they might even manage to complete the dusting of the lead vamp, but he really should've realized that pressing your luck on the Hellmouth tended to go sour.

Just as Willow was about to do a homerun swing with her mace to the lead vampires, the blind corpse surprised everyone by shooting out her right hand and grabbing his best bud by the throat. The redhead tried to swing her mace and hit the bloodsucker in an effort to get free of her captor but the walking corpse caught the swing by the wrist, stopping it cold.

"Silly little tree," the crazy vamp lady said with a fanged smile. "Eyes aren't the only way to see. No, no, no. You are quite loud, you know."

He prepared to open his mouth, to cast a spell to rescue his friend, but the crazy lady just squeezed harder, causing Willow to struggle even harder to free herself.

"Ah, ah, aahh! Not one word, little trickster," the lady vamp warned with deadly crazy intent. "One word and I'll snap her twig and then the tree will come tumbling down once and for all."

Much as he'd like to say otherwise, it would take him more than few seconds to chant even the shortest rhyme but that would be time enough for the bloodsucker to kill Willow. So with the utmost reluctance he floated back in order to show that he was backing down. He didn't trust that the undead woman would spare Willow but, until a more opportune time revealed itself, he couldn't make a single move to turn the tables on the fang face.

The sound of someone's wrist watch alarm going off caught his attention along with a few others as he looked towards the source to find that it was Ford. He wondered for a moment why the traitor had set his time for now but, when Willow began to make noises of pain and her body began to spasm, he instantly knew what was happening and why it'd happened.

Sunset.

And there was one thing that had become common for his best friend lately whenever the sun vanished below the horizon. As with the times he'd seen before first her fingers did merge, four becoming three, then her skin changed color from slightly pale Caucasian to a grayish blue color. Things became more dramatic after that when her feet went from five toes to three, with each tipped with a talon like her fingers, and her legs became what Giles had called digitigrade. To him it just meant the legs took on an appearance more akin to the hind legs of a cat but in any case her shoes were obliterated and her pants began to tear to accommodate the new configuration. The tail tore through the seat of her pants and the wings sprouted from her back, shredding the back of her shirt, making the sleeves the only thing keeping her entire upper body from being exposed. With a roar that'd be more at home coming from the mouth of a jungle cat the transformation was complete.

Thus it was that the lady vamp suddenly found herself the weaker one as Willow, with relative ease, pulled the hand that had been clamped around her throat away, letting her breath freely once more.

"Times up," Willow growled, sounding quite angry and intimidating. "Rules change."

In a move that was quite a bit more brutal than he'd been expecting, his best bud literally ripped the lady vamp's arm off of her body but, before it could be used as a club, it turned to ash. Nevertheless the scream of pain was quite satisfying to him and had a dramatic effect on the minions since they ceased trying to harm the club patrons. Instead they began to try to make their way back to the stairs in order to come to the aid of their mistress. Why they'd be so loyal to such an insane vampire he'd never understand but, since it lessened the threat to the club patrons, he considered it a good thing. Sadly, since his blindness spell was still in effect, they couldn't make quick enough progress and so as Willow brought her mace back to swing, it looked like the head was about to be cut off this gang of bloodsuckers.

Too bad with nothing left to restrain the insane bloodsucker, the unnatural thing was able to evade the swing and immediately it made for the door to the club. It was not a direct route given that his spell of blindness was still at work but with whatever senses were still left to the demon it managed to get to the door. Willow got one more swing in with her mace but, whether it was due to luck or skill, her target succeeded in evading it and got out the door escaping from his line of sight. The rest of the vampires soon followed since, as was the case with most minions, they lost their courage when their leader turned tail and ran for it. As much as he hated the idea, going after them would take more time than he and his friends had, especially if they wanted to save as many lives as possible. The moment the way was clear he zipped forward through the air, mentally keeping the levitated ailing club patrons in single file behind him as he went through the door.

Once out in the open air he soared up into the night sky, casting his eyes about for the familiar sight of the hospital and, once he had a lock on it, he flew with all the speed he could manage towards it. Through his magical grip on them he could feel the wounded patrons breathing still but they were getting weaker by the moment as the amount of blood lost began to reach the danger zone.

"Just hold on!" he said more to himself than to those he carried. "Almost there."

He just hoped that Buffy and Willow could handle things back at the club because, considering what they'd just been through, the possibility of the club members doing something stupid was high. After all they'd just witnessed their idols trying to kill them, a floating guy casting a spell and a normal girl turning into a gargoyle. Considering how he'd reacted after seeing his first vampire, he doubted that their brains were firing on all cylinders at the moment.

Still, between a Slayer and a mystical creature strong enough to crush solid stone, it'd probably take luck more than anything else for untrained civilians to take them down.

Luck or his friends' unwillingness to harm the former vampire wannabes, even if it was to protect themselves.

He prayed his friends wouldn't let their idealism get the better of them.

 _ **Sunnydale High School Library**_

 _ **Buffy's POV**_

"So let me see if I have this right…" Giles said as he cleaned his glasses in an obvious sign of his agitation. "Angel, Willow and Xander investigated Ford due to their own suspicions and discover that not only is he not a student at this school but is also connected to a vampire fan club. Buffy, in her infinite wisdom, decides to confront Ford before sundown with the desire to get answers but does so without back up of any kind or any preparation. Willow learns the details of the club's construction and suspecting a trap acquires Xander's aid before promptly leaving for the club with minimal preparation.

"They arrive in time to learn the truth but just as you are about to depart Angel's childe Drusilla arrives, intent on killing everyone present. Xander, in an act of sheer recklessness, casts a spell he has no experience with and succeeds in blinding every vampire present but, before you can take advantage of this, Drusilla takes Willow hostage," Giles recapped putting his glasses back on his nose. "Then, through sheer luck, the sun sets, causing her to transform into her gargoyle state, allowing her to overpower Drusilla, forcing her and her minions to flee. Xander then got as many of the injured to the hospital as he could levitate, WHILE flying himself, while Buffy and Willow remained behind to deal with some rather emotionally upset teenagers. Through what was likely sheer luck those same teenagers choose to go home rather than do something violent to the two of you and then you returned here. Does that about sum up what happened?"

"Yes," was all she could say in reply to the man's rather disapproving look at her.

She had to admit with the way he put it, her plan to confront Ford hadn't been the brightest of moves and the fact that everything turned out as well as it had was more due to luck than design.

"Well, you should all count yourselves fortunate that Drusilla had not been more prepared for Willow's transformation or Xander's magic," Giles said, still sounding quite disapproving though it did die down, if only by a little. "Let us hope that the loss of an arm proves incentive enough to cause her to relocate to less dangerous locations."

"That'd be nice but, considering she's batshit crazy, losing an arm might just make her that much more determined to take one of ours," Xander pointed out, obviously believing in the less positive possibility.

"True. However, with the news that the Slayer has two allies, one that can tear limbs off of bodies and the other capable of sorcery, it is likely that her minions will seek employment elsewhere," Giles said, sounding like he was considering how tonight's events had changed things in Sunnydale. "Vampires, particularly young ones, will often gravitate to stronger ones both for protection as well as the opportunities that may present themselves at a later date. By eliminating Spike and seriously handicapping Drusilla, you have brought that group's leadership into question. If one of the minions is ambitious they may try to seize control themselves. If not they will abandon her for the next most infamous demon or vampire in Sunnydale."

"At least it'll buy us some breathing room," she said, sounding a little less worried with the news that the nutty vampiress was going to be having problems of her own.

"Not much, I am afraid," Giles said, sounding less optimistic. "Vampires and demons are ruthless as you know and their power struggles are equally so. The duration of these sorts of confrontations generally depend on the strength of each side and the intelligence of their respective leaders."

"Then she's already down a point, right?" Xander asked, sounding like he'd found something to be hopeful for. "I mean, insane people generally don't make the best leaders."

"While it is true that her insanity will hamper her ability to lead her followers and her decreased ability to physically dominate the disobedient will also pose a problem, we should not count her out yet," Giles replied, shaking his head slightly. "Watcher diaries record that she has a measure of precognitive ability, though made sporadic due to her mental instability, and that should help her anticipate any strikes made against her."

"But if she can see the future then why didn't she know I was going to transform or that Xander could do magic?" Willow asked, pointing out something that was on everyone's mind but the Watcher's.

"My theory at the moment is that, due to the fact that you were given your new abilities by Janus via the Halloween spell, she cannot read you as clearly as others if at all," Giles replied, taking on a more speculative tone. "Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and endings after all. Taken further, it could easily be said that he is also the Roman god of time itself since seconds of time are constantly beginning and then ending. As such, it is possible that those touched by his power are hidden from the 'sight' of precognitive beings or perhaps the god himself is acting to hide you."

"Why would a Roman god care about us?" Willow asked, sounding like she was uncertain whether being aided by a god was a good thing.

"It is unlikely that he is doing this out of the goodness of his heart if that is what you are asking," Giles replied, sounding like he thought pigs flying would happen before a god showed genuine unbiased benevolence to a mortal creature. "It is more likely he would see the potential entertainment and sustenance your continued existence would provide him with. Many deities gain nourishment by mortals taking action involving their respective divine domains. War gods gain strength by mortals waging war. Gods of wisdom gain strength by mortals broadening the scope of their knowledge. While genuine worship of these deities may have been forced into back rooms, they can still draw power from the unknowing."

"So we're basically just TV and an endless bag of chips for Janus?" Xander asked rhetorically, once again boiling things down to the basics.

"Essentially yes," Giles replied with an expression of both amazement and exasperation. "Until he grows bored with his entertainment or his 'snacks', you will receive a measure of protection from him."

"What do you mean 'a measure of protection'?" she asked, not liking the less than complete statement.

"Basically if he thinks it'll be more amusing to let certain precognitive people see your future or certain practitioners of legilimency peer into your minds, then he will withhold his protection." Giles sounded like he disapproved of this footnote.

"Legil-whatsy?" Xander asked, sounding like he didn't recognize the word anymore than she did.

"It is the act of magically navigating through the many layers of a person's mind and correctly interpreting one's findings," Giles replied, sounding concerned. "Contrary to what you may think, this is NOT the same as telepathy or mind reading."

"Sure sounds like it to me," Xander said, dismissing the opposition to the term.

"Whatever," Willow said, moving things away from an ultimately pointless argument. "Shouldn't we be worrying about the vampire power struggle about to break out in Sunnydale?"

"While certainly a matter for concern, it will not be quite as bad as you are likely imagining," Giles said reassuringly as he turned his head to the sitting gargoyle. "The vampires know it is to their benefit to keep their existence a secret from the human race and even if they did not various other demonic species would. They would almost certainly intervene if Drusilla or her usurper became too public with their activities."

"So no demolished lengths of streets with fires everywhere you look but turning the wrong corner'll be even more fatal than usual," Xander said, sounding decidedly less concerned than before. "Sounds like business as usual to me just with my mojo training needing to be upped."

"That goes without saying," Giles said with a somewhat sharper tone. "Since it is clear that you will throw caution to the wind when it comes to your magic under certain circumstances, I suppose I have no choice but to intensify your instruction in order to minimize potential calamities."

"You're saying you're worried I'll accidentally blow something up if you don't double up on the spell teaching?" Xander asked, a bit of humor in his tone.

At this point she expected her Watcher to be polite with his response, reserved, as he was with most things due to his upper crust British upbringing.

"Suffice it to say I would prefer Sunnydale not be made to resemble a demilitarized zone due to one of your ill phrased rhymes," Giles replied with a hint of a grin formed by his lips.

Everyone looked at the Brit, herself included, after hearing his response, and for a moment wondered where the hell that'd come from.

Then they comprehended the humor of it and even Xander chuckled a bit at the images it produced.

 _ **An Unknown Location**_

"What is going on?" she asked as she looked at the jewel in her hand. "This is the second time it's glowed!"

"I know as much as you do," he said with an expression that indicated he was considering various possibilities at once. "Still we should have a bit of time before things get complicated. The jewel is part of a pair and the other one is hidden well. It would take a much stronger reaction than what we've seen before THEY'D notice it and send someone to investigate."

"Let's finish our assignment quickly then," she said with significant worry in her voice. "We need to find out what's going on before it becomes too big for us to hide by ourselves."

A nod of agreement was all he gave before they left the room they'd rented for where their intel said their quarry would be tonight.


	4. Big Problems From Small Beginnings

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the copyrighted material contained herein. They are the rightful property of their respective creators and/or associated companies. I make no profit from this whatsoever and I have no intention of changing this at any point in the future. I write because it's fun and because some people enjoy reading my work. Therefore I would greatly appreciate it if no legal action were taken against me. I can promise you that you won't get even a sixth of your legal fees back from me.

 _ **A Safe but Obscure Clearing in Sunnydale**_

 _ **Willow's POV**_

 _Things are heating up out there,_ she thought even as she watched Xander continue to learn how to master his magic. _I think Giles might've been wrong about the vampires keeping things low key._

In the last week alone vampires had engaged in four different confrontations and. while they'd been confined to the warehouse district and the docks. the damage had been enough to make the local newspaper. 'Vandals on PCP' was the official story that the police and city hall were going with and everyone except the gang accepted it thanks to Sunnydale Syndrome. Even though it'd been three weeks since the incident at the Sunset Club. the local vampires hadn't wasted any time trying to establish a new pecking order. In the end it was probably for the best that the authorities remained out of it because. if they knew the truth. they'd try to stop it themselves and probably get killed or turned in the process. Until the world at large came to know the truth about demons and vampires. only those who knew the truth were capable of combatting them without needless deaths.

Looking down at her grayish-blue talon-tipped hands and looking up to see a blast of emerald energy leap from Xander's hand towards its intended target, she believed that now the Scooby gang was more capable than ever. Perhaps now they'd be able to do more than simply rescue a handful of people every night and could actually begin a real effort to clean up Sunnydale. Lay the groundwork for making it into the sleepy Californian town the uninformed people of the world thought it was. She wasn't stupid enough that she thought it'd be easy and she conceded that she probably wouldn't live to see the work completed, but it was a worthy goal. All they were doing now was trying to hold back a flood with umbrellas, an exercise in futility. For every life they saved, dozens more were ended. She had seen the coroner's reports and, with a little careful examination, she'd been able to identify which ones were normal deaths and which had been caused by supernatural or demonic means. It was safe to say that over eighty percent of the deaths in her hometown were not of natural causes or anything that mainstream society would accept.

In the face of such figures it was difficult to believe that their efforts each night really mattered.

Nevertheless she was reassured at least by the fact that since they were on guard in Sunnydale, the odds of the Hellmouth opening were considerably less than if they'd done nothing this past year and a half. If it hadn't been for them, The Master would've opened the Hellmouth and a few others would've killed a great many more people.

They might not be pushing the enemy back but they were keeping the big red demonic nuke button from being pressed and that was enough.

"Very good, Xander," Giles said from his lawn chair where he'd been observing the spell casting. "You're aim is improving and I saw only a flicker of energy bleed off."

"Thanks. I think I've got the trick to controlling it all," Xander said, letting a bit of his magic dance across his fingertips like electricity. "Just a little fine tuning needed."

"That will come with practice," Giles said with a reassuring grin. "Now let us move onto something a little more advanced and see how you fare."

"What've you got in mind?" Willow asked, intrigued by the idea of something more difficult than what the Watcher had been drilling her best friend on since the incident with Ford.

"Matter-energy manipulation," Giles replied before bringing up a warning finger. "Just the basics, mind you. Nothing advanced. It takes years of practice before one can call themselves a master at it."

"Is it anything like levitation?" Xander asked, looking for clarification.

"No. Matter-energy manipulation involves using magic to influence either matter or energy to the point where you can choose what form it takes or how it behaves," Giles replied as he got to his feet, picking up an oddly shaped crystal as he did so. "Now mind you I am a bit out of practice so it may take one or more tries on my part."

With that the Watcher brought the crystal up like a wand or a talisman and after a few seconds it began to glow from within. Eager to see what effect this would have, she looked about the immediate area to see if anything was changing. It didn't take her long to find as dirt rose up out of the ground until there was enough to fill a small sack. What happened next kept her from asking what made this different from levitation as the dirt began to take on a VERY specific shape. The reshaping was not the smoothest and she could tell that a few times Giles had to reestablish his grip on a pinch or two of dirt, but in the end a passable short sword had been made.

"Now… keep in mind… that I am maintaining… both the shape as well as the density… of the sword through magic and willpower," Giles said with evident strain in his voice. "A fluctuation… with either variable… and the short sword will… begin to lose its form… as well as become… less adept at cutting… or blocking."

A few seconds later the light within the crystal vanished and simultaneously the sword of dirt dropped to the ground, becoming nothing more than a lump.

"Now… the denser or more complicated the raw material, the more power you will need to employ in order to reshape it into your desired form," Giles said as he relaxed from the strain he'd been under. "This magic does not grant the material you employ any additional attributes. Dirt will still be dirt and stone will still be stone. As such if your opponent's weapon is made of stronger or sharper material, then all you will have to keep your weapon in one piece is your magic and your willpower. This magic is difficulty enough with solid matter. It becomes decidedly more difficult when trying to manipulate water, air or some form of energy."

That made sense.

Solid matter would be easy to shape into a weapon since it was essentially already halfway there, but anything else would be decidedly more difficult to make tangible enough to block an opponent's weapon.

"Now, I trust you were attentive enough to get a feel for the magic being channeled by the crystal I held?" Giles asked, looking towards his pointy-eared student.

"Yep," Xander replied with a nod of his head.

"Then for your first attempt try to form something simple from the dirt in front of you," Giles said as he laid out the objective of the test. "Something nonlethal would be my suggestion. Just in case."

A nod was all her best friend and current crush provided before he stretched forth with his dominant hand and an eerie green glow began to flow off his body. She watched as dirt began to rise from the ground but it was decidedly larger than what Giles had attempted, making her wonder if Xander was trying for something out of his reach. It'd been such a strain on Giles just to make the short sword and keep it in one piece with only half as much dirt.

"While ambition is not necessarily a bad thing, Xander, it is not wise for you to attempt something beyond your reach." Giles cautioned, no doubt hoping his words would be heeded.

 _Even after more than a year he doesn't know Xander as well as I do,_ she thought with an amused shake of her head.

For as long as she'd known her friend, Xander had always been one to do first and think later. He did it trying to protect her from those who'd bully her even when they were bigger and stronger than he was. He did it whenever a half formed idea popped into his head that he hadn't really thought through but still thought was quite brilliant. That was why she'd taken on the role of the more logical one, the responsible one, in order to keep Xander from doing something would get him into a great deal more trouble than he could handle. She saw it as a way of repaying him for his acts of kindness and his friendship.

Most of the time she managed to keep him under control. The rest of the time Xander went ahead like the bullheaded person he was but somehow still managed to come out more or less in one piece.

This looked to be one of those times.

Magic surrounded the mass of dirt, a testament to how much was being employed, but eventually it began to take shape. She couldn't quite tell what her friend was trying to create with his power but it seemed to be rather tall for a weapon, measuring roughly five and a half feet by her reckoning. As curves were introduced into the mass, she began to think that maybe it was a serpent sword of some kind. Xander did have a thing for fantasy weapons, so it made sense that he'd choose something like that rather than something plain. It was when holes began to form in specific spots in the mass that her prediction about what he was trying to make began to unravel since what she was seeing didn't match any sword design she knew of. More and more the holes grew until they ceased to be perfectly circular, taking on less uniform shapes as her friend continued to sculpt the dirt into his desired shape.

It was only when she saw two spots began to take on recognizable shapes that she realized what he was trying to make. Pointed ears began to form on either side of the top portion and what looked to be long waist length hair that flowed straight and true. Definition and detail grew as limbs formed from the mass, slender yet strong ones, and then to top it all off a pair of mounds began to form on the chest that had her narrowing her eyes at her friend's imagination.

When all was said and done it became perfectly clear what, or rather WHO, her friend had created out of the dirt he'd taken from the ground.

"Xander, I don't think Titania would look like that in real life," she said, warning laced through her tone of voice. "For one thing her chest is too big and I doubt her… rear end looks like that."

"Xander…" Buffy said with a sharp tone that implied reprisal if he didn't drop what he was doing IMMEDIATELY.

Self-preservation being one of her best friend's strong points, he instantly stopped using his magic and the dirt he'd been utilizing plopped to the ground in a pile.

"C'mon, guys!" Xander said, trying to do the whole innocent 'it is not a big deal' routine. "I was just going with what was easiest for me to picture in my head."

"And the easiest thing you could picture was a busty Titania with the perfect butt?" she asked with a raised skeptical eyebrow.

"Well… yeah," he replied with a shrug before a look of recollection emerged on his face. "I mean, not to be too blunt, but the cartoons never really did Titania justice."

"What do you mean?" Giles asked, sounding interested for purely academic reasons.

"Well, I… might have retained a few snippets of memory from Puck," Xander replied, only briefly leaving his moment of recollection. "One of them was of how Titania looked as a real person rather than a cartoon character. Believe it or not I shaped the dirt realistically, so no giving me the 'Xander, you pervert' routine."

Thinking back to the dirt statue of Titania, she tried to determine whether she should believe her friend or label him a teenage boy trying to excuse his dirty little mind. She eventually decided to give him the benefit of a doubt but she'd be watching him from there on out to make sure he didn't abuse his magic for… guy things.

It was a perfectly reasonable concern.

Now, if he decided to use her as the model for his next matter construct and decided to… exaggerate certain parts of her, she wouldn't mind all that much.

Maybe.

 _ **The Harris House**_

 _ **Xander's POV**_

"Knotgrass! Flittle! Thistlewit!" he said as he walked into that which had been the Harris home in all but name. "I'm home!"

It didn't take long for three fluttering orbs of light to come to him from three different parts of the house and, once they were close enough, the light dimmed to reveal tiny women. It'd been a sight he'd gradually been getting used to since coming home Halloween night even if there was one part he didn't much like.

"Welcome home, your highness," the three women said, bowing respectfully to him like he was royalty.

Sure, technically he was by being the son of a former queen of the Moors, but he hadn't been raised as such and didn't see himself as a prince. Still, the three fairies insisted on treating him according to the royal protocol of their people, with only a few concessions because he insisted upon them. He wanted to keep things low key and not to draw attention to the house. The way things were inside the house now was so different from how it'd been before he'd come into his inheritance. Before Halloween he'd always dreaded coming back to the Harris House and never had he really considered it home, since to him home was supposed to be a warm place filled a loving family. Instead it'd been a place where he was repeatedly reminded of how worthless he was and who he'd sooner die than become.

Now it was a place where he truly felt loved and where every night before bed he learned more about his true mother and father.

"Anything interesting happen while I was at school?" he asked as he tossed his book bag by the stairs.

"Not really," Knotgrass replied as Flittle flew off into the kitchen. "We've finally managed to fix the last of the wear and tear on the house as well as the grass outside. I'm afraid we had to toss the refrigerator, though. Even fairy magic couldn't make it clean again!"

"I'm not surprised considering some of the mold I've seen growing in there," he said, remembering how sometimes he'd been afraid to open the thing.

"Yes, well, fortunately our magic will be able to keep some of the more perishable things cold until they can be used to make a meal or eaten on their own," Knotgrass said, sounding like she was already making plans to efficiently use what needed to be kept frozen. "I've already put in an order for a replacement but it's going to be a while."

"No problem. Even if we don't have food in the house, there're plenty of takeout places in Sunnydale," he said, not worried in the least about any of them going hungry.

"Not the healthiest food to eat but I suppose if we're left with no other choice it'll do in a pinch," Thistlewit said, sounding as though she'd rather not be pushed that far.

Flittle returned a few seconds later with a glass of milk in her arms like always and, just as before, he plucked it from her just as it looked as though it was too much for her to carry any longer. He often wondered why they didn't just assume more human sized forms since he knew they could and, when he'd asked once, he'd gotten a reasonable enough answer. It'd been so long since they'd been allowed to flutter about in their true forms that they didn't want to waste a single opportunity to do so. After he'd thought it over he had to admit that, if he'd been forced into a displeasing form and asked to stay in it for years, he wouldn't want to waste a moment of his freedom once he'd reclaimed it.

Still, as soon as he figured they'd had their fill of their natural forms, he'd suggest that they consider changing into something a little more human, if only to make their tasks a little easier.

"How was school?" Flittle asked after taking a moment to breathe some strength back into her body.

"The usual. Boring classes and Snyder taking every opportunity to make the lives of the students miserable," he replied, shaking his head at the principle's obsession with making people feel even worse than him. "I've got to take a catch up class with Miss Calendar tomorrow to improve my grade with her and, as luck would have it, I'll be spending it with Willow… and Cordelia."

"Awful girl!" Flittle said, curling her lips with distaste. "Met her once as Jessica Harris, along with her mother. Suffice it to say that the apple did not fall far from the proverbial tree."

"I'm not surprised there," he said, imagining that the head cheerleader had to have learned her 'charming personality' from someone. "I'm almost hoping for something Hellmouthy to happen just so I can 'miss' that particular class."

"Well, if you wanted, we could always make it so the computers won't work," Thistlewit said, sounding like she wouldn't mind doing it herself. "Make it so it'd take a couple of weeks before they'd be working again."

He considered the possibility for precisely a moment before he shook his head. "That'd just be putting it off for later," he said, much to his inner regret. "Better to go with the band aid way of doing things."

"Very well," Thistlewit said with only a little sigh of disappointment.

"How are your lessons with Mister Giles going?" Knotgrass asked, moving things along to less actions of a questionable nature.

"Not bad. Flying's like walking to me now and I can manage making stuff out of dirt now as long as no one breaks my concentration," he replied, slightly wincing at the 'tap' to his shoulder Willow had given him when he'd let his INSPIRATION slide into the gutter again. "G-man said once I manage to hold the shape no matter what, we'll move onto something harder. Considering how much of a book lover he is, I'm not sure I want to find out what he'd consider 'harder'."

"Now, now! You are the son of the great Maleficent of the Moors!" Knotgrass declared reprovingly as she fluttered closer to him. "I have no doubt whatsoever that you'll rise to the challenge. Rise and OVERCOME it! You just need to get a bit of confidence into you, that's all."

"Kinda hard to after…" he said, almost referring to his treatment in the years up to the present before taking into account how the fairies would feel. "It'll just take time."

Despite his efforts, though, expressions of guilt and sorrow appeared on each of the fairies' faces as they remembered what they'd done previous to Halloween. Of course they'd done their best to make it up to him by cleaning the house, making him delicious meals and lending their knowledge of nonhuman species when it was appropriate. Nevertheless, there were times when they likely thought he wasn't looking when looks of guilt crossed their faces before being swept quickly away. They needn't feel such guilt because in his mind the true blame lay with the man who'd insisted they act so in exchange for protection that deserved his wrath. As soon as he managed to pry the name of the guilty party out of the three fairies, he would immediately begin making plans for payback with all the resources available to him.

By the time he was done, the man would never sleep soundly again because of the shape both mind and body would be in at the end.

"Do you guys know any spells that I could do?" he asked, thinking that giving him some help might brighten their moods. "Any you could teach me?"

"Well… most of what we know is fairly advanced. Changing our appearances being one of them," Knotgrass replied, looking a little hesitant. "It's not something you want to make a mistake on."

"Is there some sort of buildup work I can do for it?" he asked, sounding interested at the idea of turning himself into something or someone else. "Some books I could read?"

"I'm afraid I don't know of any human books but give us a bit of time and we might be able locate some others," Thistlewit replied, sounding like some ideas were forming in her head.

"Others? What do you mean?" he asked, not quite understanding.

"Well you don't really think that humans are the only species that commit their knowledge to the written page, do you?" Knotgrass asked with some amusement at his error. "Countless nonhuman races do it and some survivors of the Moor's destruction have transcribed such things in an effort to ensure that something of our people survived. It'll take some time but we'll see if they have anything they can safely send to Sunnydale."

"Thanks! I think this might be the first time I'm actually excited about reading a book," he said with his trademark lopsided grin.

"Good. You're smarter than you give yourself credit for, Xander," Flittle said with an admiring grin. "The fact that you've managed to keep up with your friend Willow is proof of it."

"Yeah, I know," he said, remembering one of the few bright spots of his life.

In the beginning he'd downplayed it as just being the result of Willow's good tutoring skills but then he'd realized that his memory and his ability to comprehend what he was being told were just as relevant. He still didn't think that he'd manage to get a blank check to any university or college he wanted like she would, but with a little luck he'd manage to get a scholarship to cover at least some of the cost of tuition.

Assuming, of course, that he even chose to go on to college in the first place and not just get a job straight out of high school.

He was, after all, dedicated to the good fight and the burden of taking university level classes could very well get in the way of that. He knew that Buffy had flubbed a few school assignments because she'd been busy fighting the demon of the week or preventing the end of the world, so he doubted he'd fare any better.

"Well, as much as I'd like to stay and gab, I've got homework to do and an early review class to get to," he said, finishing his glass of milk. "Anything need doing before I head upstairs?"

"Don't worry about it," Knotgrass said with a grateful smile on her face. "We've got everything well in hand. You just focus on your studies."

"If you say so," he said returning her smile. "Just be sure to give me a shout if you need an extra hand or two."

"We will," Flittle said with a nod of acknowledgment.

Taking into account the privacy the house provided, he took to the air and flew up the stairs, not seeing the point in doing it the old fashioned way when he didn't have to.

It was the Fae way, after all.

 _ **Sunnydale High School**_

 _ **Computer Lab**_

 _ **Buffy's POV**_

"Uh, sit here, Buffs!" Xander called as he stood up from his seat in the computer room. "Demilitarize the zone between me and Cordelia!"

As much as she wanted to oblige her friend, she had something a little more important to concern herself with than the ongoing war of words between Xander and Cordelia. Turning and walking over to Miss Calendar, she decided to just jump into what she needed to talk about.

"Actually I wanted to talk to you for a second," she said, a little bit of her worry seeping into her voice.

"Something wrong?" Miss Calendar asked, taking her words seriously.

"Is there some crisis that requires instant action?" Xander asked, sounding like he smelled an escape route forming. "Very far from here?"

"It's Giles," she replied, remembering what she'd seen of her Watcher the previous night.

She'd gone to his place after he'd missed their joint mission to keep the local vamps from stealing the latest shipment of blood to the hospital. However not only was he unwilling to explain his absence to her satisfaction, he'd been in quite a rush to send her on her way. It was very impolite and therefore very un-Giles-like, but short of kicking his apartment door down to force him to tell the truth, she'd been left with few options.

"Well, he's alright, isn't he?" Miss Calendar asked, her concern heightening.

"I don't know. Uh, he didn't show up when he was supposed to last night and then when I went over to his place he was acting… well, very anti-Giles," she replied, trying to condense her reply just in case time proved to be a factor in what was going on. "He wouldn't let me in and he looked really bad. I-I think he might've been… I think he was drinking."

"He was home alone drinking?" Miss Calendar asked, sounding puzzled by the news.

"But… tea, right?" Willow asked, sounding like she wanted to believe better of her mentor.

"Wasn't tea, Will," she replied, shaking her head in the negative.

"Yep, yep, I knew this would happen," Xander said, sounding like it'd been all too obvious to him. "Nobody can be wound as straight and narrow as Giles without a dark side erupting. My Uncle Rory was the stodgiest taxidermist you've ever met by day. By night, it was booze, whores and fur flying. Were there whores?"

"He was alone," she replied, not even giving her mind time enough to conjure any 'Ew' worthy images.

"Give it time," Xander said as though it were inevitable that Giles would indulge in… THAT… practice.

"So, none of you guys have noticed anything different lately?" she asked, looking first at Willow and then at Xander.

"Nope," Xander replied, looking as though he couldn't recall anything of consequence.

"No, he seemed perfectly normal yesterday when I saw him talking to the police," Cordelia said offhand as she looked at herself in her compact mirror before touching up her makeup.

THIS caused just about everyone to turn to the socialite in disbelief that the girl had taken this long to tell them what was obviously a crucial piece of information.

"And you waited till now to tell us this because…?" she asked, wanting to know the reason even though she suspected what it was already.

"I didn't think it was important," Cordelia replied, still not realizing that it was NOT an everyday occurrence for someone to be visited by the police.

"We understand," Xander said with exasperation as he rolled his eyes. "It wasn't about you."

"Well, what were the police talking about?" Miss Calendar asked, plying for more information.

"Oh, don't tell me, I know this one," Cordelia replied taking a moment to think before arriving at the answer. "Um… something about… a homicide."

 _A HOMICIDE!?_ she thought in shock at the sheer self-centeredness and stupidity of the cheerleader.

Even at her worst back at Hemery she'd have realized the seriousness of one of her teachers being visited by the police about a homicide.

"That's it," she said, moving towards the classroom door intent on finding a phone. "I-I'm calling him right now."

Moving through the hallways, she made her way to the nearest phone she knew of, the one in the library, determined to get some answers from her Watcher. If he kept stonewalling her she'd march over to his apartment again and this time she WOULD kick the door in because she was not going to get shut out of things if her mentor was in trouble.

She would get to the bottom of this!

Entering the library, she began to move to Giles' office when a sound coming from behind the stacks caught her attention causing her to stop cold. Turning towards the source, she was shocked to see what looked like a man, or rather a male corpse, who looked to be about five steps from falling to pieces entirely. It shambled about and, if she didn't know any better, she'd think it was following a scent that only it could detect, but she decided that it didn't really matter what it was doing there. She might not act like it most of the time in front of her friends but she had a keen mind and it didn't take her long to match the shambling arrival to her Watcher's unusual behavior. Coincidences just didn't happen on the Hellmouth when it came to timing, so in her mind she labeled it a threat and charged forward to make with the slayage.

In the time that it took most people to blink she had crossed the gap between herself and the zombie, allowing her to unleash a series of blows meant to shatter bone. The corpse tried to fight back but, whether it was due to lack of intelligence or the limitations of its less than perfect physical condition, it was easy to avoid it. However when what had to be two minutes of fighting passed with no visible sign of the thing going down she knew she'd have to rethink her strategy. Grabbing it by what remained of its jacket, she threw it towards the book cage where the weapons were before following it and sweeping its legs out from under it as it tried to stand back up.

Opening the cage, she immediately went for a sword since in almost every zombie movie she'd ever seen, chopping the walking dead people into pieces usually settled things. Letting her instincts and the lessons she'd been given by her Watchers, both Merrick and Giles, guide her, she began to hack off limbs. There was no particular order to it but rather simply taking advantage of the openings the corpse provided, but the end result was the same. Before long she had severed both arms as well as one of its legs, leaving it struggling to remain upright rather than flat on its back.

She was just about to deliver the decapitation blow when it suddenly began to go into convulsions, causing her to pause and wonder what would happen next.

It turned out to be something quite gross as the zombie disintegrated into an icky bluish goo that had her stepping back as swiftly as she could to keep any of it from getting on her. As it was a single drop managed to get on one of her toes and reflexively she kicked outwards to fling the drop someplace else. Most of it went flying but there was still a sickly residue that her walking over to the library counter to get a tissue to wipe it off with.

Three steps later a wave of dizziness hit her that was strong enough to cause her to come to a complete stop in order to regain her balance. Luckily it seemed her Slayer constitution was strong enough to shake off whatever had her swaying because a few seconds later everything was back to normal. Shaking it off as nothing serious, she continued on to the counter and a few seconds later was wiping the gunk off her toe before disposing of the tissue in the nearby waste basket.

"Giles is SO lucky I didn't wear my best shoes today," she said as she thought about what to do next.

She had come to the library because she'd thought that even with how odd her Watcher had been acting the last time she'd seen him that he'd come to work like normal. If he wasn't there then the only other place he could be would be his apartment. For a moment she considered leaving school grounds and heading right there but that would get her into extra trouble with Snyder and maybe the bad news would trickle home to her mom.

THAT would be a nightmare and a half!

So she decided to take a shortcut that would still get her what she wanted.

 _ **Rupert Giles' Apartment**_

 _ **Giles' POV**_

 _What am I going to do?_

It was a question he'd been asking himself ever since the first visions hit him and he was no closer to getting an answer than when he'd started. Eyghon was coming for him and it had already succeeded in eliminating the others. With Ethan dead by Willow's hands he was the only member of the original group left to be targeted. Until it got to him, the demon would continue to hop from host body to host body, rapidly decaying it from the inside out each time. He'd considered erecting powerful protection wards around his apartment and waiting until Eyghon failed to reach another host in time, but his instincts as a Watcher dismissed the scenario immediately. There were too many people in Sunnydale and too few who knew the truth about the supernatural, making the uninformed easy prey for the ghost of his misspent youth.

However at the same time he had no clue as to how to vanquish Eyghon without getting decidedly closer than was wise. As far as he knew, the only way to send the demon back to where it came from was to kill the host body while ensuring that nothing dead or unconscious was close by for it to jump into. Sadly, in Sunnydale dead bodies were rather plentiful, either in the form of the various demon breeds or the bodies they left behind after they'd taken what they wanted. All Eyghon would need would be a dead body in reasonable condition to either come after him or one that could endure long enough to come across a better one.

He'd seen the death rates that the Watcher's Council had uncovered prior to assigning him to the Hellmouth and, given the sheer number of people who perished PER WEEK, Eyghon would not have to travel far should its current body begin to fail. There were almost certainly bodies that lay where they had been discarded, never discovered by the less then competent Sunnydale Police Department. With no idea where they were, it would be too dangerous to confront Eyghon inside the city limits and that meant leaving Sunnydale for someplace devoid of useful corpses.

That was only marginally better than fighting the demon in Sunnydale.

Still… for the sake of the children he had to try.

RING! RING!

RING! RING!

For a moment he considered ignoring the phone and proceeding with his desperate plan to finish off the demon from his past. However if it was either Buffy or one of the others, his lack of reply might well spur them into seeking him out and, if they arrived at an inopportune time, they could well become the monster's next host.

Thus with a sigh he stopped what he was doing and picked up the phone, stopping its ringing.

"Hello?" he asked, hoping that he could end the call quickly.

"Giles, I know you said to keep out of whatever it is you're hip deep in but I think your problem just dissolved into goop on the library floor." Buffy said over the phone, sounding irritated and impatient.

NO!

Even though he wished nothing more than for his charges to be safe, Eyghon still managed to get to one of them.

The most important one as a matter of fact!

"Are you alright!? Are you hurt!?" he asked quickly, hoping that his choice to keep the facts to himself had not led to his Slayer being harmed.

"I'm fine. The zombie thing didn't land a single hit," Buffy replied ,sounding more irritated than concerned. "But if wind up getting a wart because some of its gunk got on my foot, you're paying to have it removed."

For a moment his fear spiked as he worried that Eyghon might have leapt into Buffy's body but then remembered that the Slayer was neither deceased nor unconscious, so she was safe from that.

Still, it never hurt to be extra careful and there were some evils that left a lingering taint via their remains.

"Remain where you are," he ordered as he immediately began to think of purification rituals. "I will be there shortly."

Before Buffy could say anything he hung up and began rearranging the contents of the bag he'd been packing, focusing on the things he'd need for expelling whatever taint Eyghon might have passed on to his Slayer. It was true that he would like to believe that the demon was gone for good, but the busy nature of working on a Hellmouth meant that it was entirely possible that in the last month or so some dead body could've been hidden on the school grounds. The books on Eyghon were rather vague when it came to precisely how far was too far for the monster to travel in search of a new host and, if its range extended to the entire school property… the problem would still remain.

More than that, since some of the demon's remains had made physical contact with Buffy, it could imply that a connection had formed. A connection that the demon could later utilize to its benefit once it was ready to come after him. Thus it was imperative that he remove the taint on Buffy sooner rather than later.

In less than ten minutes he was packed and tossing the bag into his car, sliding into the driver's seat. With its usual stubbornness his car was reluctant to start but, with a little coaxing, the engine finally started, allowing him to pull onto the street before heading towards the school. As much as he loved his car and valued it as a classic, he had to admit that this was one of those times that he could see Xander's point when it came to upgrading to something more current. In its current state his car was only just able to make the posted speed limit and he knew that if he pushed it any harder it could well give out on him. He'd looked into the matter of fixing it up, replacing failing parts, but sadly the cost of those repairs were beyond his current financial means. As a result he would have to make do with what he had for at least a few years more.

The next twenty minutes were some of the longest he'd had to deal with in a long while but eventually he arrived at the school. With speed the belied his age he exited his vehicle, bag in hand as he raced for the library in the hopes that he was not already too late to protect his charge. The moment he pushed open the door he looked about the library for Buffy and found her along with the rest. Looking to the floor he saw the 'goop' Buffy had mentioned, immediately confirming with his experience and knowledge that it was demonic in nature. It was also consistent with what he'd researched in the past about Eygon.

"Buffy!" he said as he walked up to her before going through the mental checklist all Watchers were taught during their training.

There was even one instructor who'd made it his business to make sure they never forgot the list by specifically constructing tests so that it was the only way they could survive.

From what he could tell there were no visible discolorations consistent with a harmful substance interacting with human tissue. Looking at Buffy's expression and body language, she did not appear to be in any pain or anything else that could be described as out of the ordinary other than the fact that she was quite put out with his secrecy involving Eyghon. Reaching into his coat pocket, he extracted a jewel and, after speaking a quick activation incantation, he put it in close proximity to Buffy, waiting to see what reaction if any there was.

Nothing.

 _While more testing will be required, it does not appear as though the demonic residue has had any immediate effects on Buffy,_ he thought as he stepped back allowing himself at least SOME relief.

From what he'd read of the texts, the reason why Eyghon could only inhabit the bodies of the unconscious or the dead was because that was when a human's mental defenses were at their weakest. As long as a human was awake, their own natural protections would keep Eyghon out and, since Buffy had not been unconscious at any point of the fight, Eyghon's method of entry was blocked. He might need to make her remain conscious until he gave her a clean mystical bill of health but he felt that they had most certainly dodged a metaphorical bullet this day.

"O-KAY! Now that you've finished giving me a once over make with the 'splainy." Buffy demanded with the utmost insistence.

"I… I'm afraid I have something of a troubling past. One I did not wish to share with the rest if you since it was more than a little personal," he said, figuring that lying or stonewalling would only make Buffy press harder. "When I was young I had different dreams about what I wanted to do with my life that didn't involve the Watcher's Council. However it is a tradition among families that are a part of the Council that the sons inherit their father's position and follow in their footsteps. My father made it abundantly clear to me from a very young age what I would be doing with my life.

"Needless to say once adolescence set in I became determined to defy him so I left my studies and threw in with whatever disreputable group would have me. Eventually I became friends with a group and with one member in particular. Ethan Rayne," he said, approaching the harder part of the explanation. "We'd raise a commotion, cause trouble and dabble in whatever magic caught our fancy. There was a euphoria to it all, defying my father and the rules of society, that made me feel quite free. I should've known better.

"One day we learned of a demon summoning that could be performed that would give both the host and the other participants a greater high than anything we'd done thus far. It was the summoning for Eyghon the Sleepwalker," he said, finally dropping the name that had caused him to be afraid for so long. "Eyghon cannot exist in this reality on his own. He needs an unconscious body or a corpse in order to fully manifest, with it being best if it was the former with the person having a propensity for magic. Randall volunteered to be the host for the demon and we performed the summoning. We thought we were so prepared, thought that we had covered every angle, but we were fools. Eyghon swallowed Randall whole. We did our best to exorcise the demon from our friend but we failed and killed him in the process.

"After that the group shattered and walked away from that lifestyle. All except Ethan. I went back to my father, tail between my legs, begging him to accept me back and help me resume my path to being a Watcher. It was difficult but I worked hard and paid no heed to the more obedient classmates of mine who never passed up an opportunity to remind me of my disgraceful actions," he said, remembering those hard days. "It was one of the reasons I was surprised that I was assigned to be your Watcher. Normally the position would've been filled by someone who epitomized what the Council leadership thought a Slayer's Watcher should be. With the blemish on my record, most thought I would never receive such an esteemed position. Still, it is one I have come to cherish despite the various bouts of exasperation you occasionally cause."

"Then that was Eyghon I slayed?" Buffy asked, sounding a little stunned but also calm.

"In a host body, yes," he replied with a nod. "However without an unconscious body or a corpse to inhabit, we may have seen the last of it. It was one of the reasons why I was so concerned when you called and said that some of the… the 'goo' had gotten on your foot."

"You mean it could be POSSESSING ME!?" Buffy exclaimed.

"NO! No that is impossible. Every book I've ready on Eyghon makes it clear that it could only have possessed you if you'd been unconscious or deceased. Since neither was the case, it would have been impossible for it to gain entry into your body," he declared firmly and without doubt in his knowledge on the subject.

He'd had very good reasons after Randall's death to ensure that Eyghon would not rear its ugly head once more and ascertain why the summoning went as it had.

"That being said, I would like to ensure that he left no lingering taint on you that might cause you harm later. Some demon blood has the ability to pass on aspects of the demon to another," he said, broaching the next most immediate topic. "I think we can both agree that no traits that Eyghon could pass on would be beneficial to you in the least."

"Uh huh," Buffy said, sounding floored by what she'd been told.

Without further delay he began to set things up for the various diagnostic, cleansing and purification spells that would drive whatever lingering filth Eyghon might have left out of Buffy's body.

It was a little difficult since Xander and Willow began to ask questions about his past but he did his best to humor them while at the same time focusing on the task at hand.

…Oh, alright, he mostly focused on answering Willow's questions since they were more polite and not focused on discovering embarrassing facts about him that he'd prefer to keep to himself.

His hold was weak.

It had not been to his benefit to make the trip but he had been left with no choice.

It had either been this or banishment from the mortal realm until the next magic caster summoned him.

Nevertheless, all hope was not lost.

Every time the Slayer slumbered he would have an opportunity to expand his dominion within her body and, once his territory was larger than what she controlled, he could act openly.

 _Yesssss… the body of a Slayer will last quite a long while,_ he thought with glee as imagined the look of sorrow on Rupert's face. _See you soon Ripper!_

 _ **Sunnydale High School**_

 _ **The Student Lounge**_

 _ **The Next Day**_

 _ **Xander's POV**_

"Are you a people person, or do you prefer keeping your own company?'" he said, reading the question on his career aptitude test out loud. "Well, what if I'm a people person who keeps his own company by default?"

"So, mark 'none of the above'." Buffy said from her seat, working on her own test.

"Well, there are no boxes for 'none of the above'. That would introduce too many variables into their mushroom head, number-crunching little world," he said with annoyance at the latest task forced on him by the school.

"I'm sensing bitterness," Willow said as she sat down next to him.

"No, it's just these people can't tell from one multiple choice test what we're going to be doing for the rest of our lives," he said, explaining his annoyance. "It's ridiculous!"

"I'm kinda curious to find out what sort of career I could have," Willow said, obviously happy about anything that had to do with school, testing and anything academic.

"What, and suck all the spontaneity out of being young and stupid?" he asked with a bit of humor in his voice. "I'd rather live in the dark."

"You're not going to be young forever," Willow pointed out like she always did when he didn't look at the big picture.

"Actually, Willow, according to the flitting females at home, being half you know what means I'll likely live up to six times the average human male lifespan," he said, remembering what Knotgrass had told him awhile back.

It'd been one of the things he'd been curious about ever since he'd accepted that he was now half-fae. Aside from the shitty reaction to anything iron, there were other things he needed to know about in order to keep unpleasant surprises to a minimum. The prolonged lifespan was a big thing and, while he'd considered the possibility that he might now be immortal like Oberon's Children were said to be, this was quickly dismissed. While he might have dressed as The Puck for Halloween in reality he was a very different breed of fae and that meant that, while extremely long lived, it was possible to die of old age.

It'd just take a seriously long time even for a half-breed like him.

Fortunately for him food would not be as big an issue since being half human meant that it was safe to eat human food rather than seek out sustenance commonly eaten by fae. Thistlewit had then also pointed out that, due to his mixed heritage, it would be possible for him to sire children with a wider variety of women some of which needn't be completely human. This had caused him to do a spit take that nearly hit Knotgrass and Flittle before the two had expressed their disapproval at their longtime friend's broaching of a very personal topic.

As for him, while he was glad to hear that he'd have no trouble having a kid or three in the future, he'd likely keep his girlfriend criteria in the human territory. It wasn't that he didn't see the benefit of getting involved in someone who was only partially human, such as a lifespan comparable to his own, but he'd lived all of his life as a human.

It'd just be too weird getting involved with someone with horns, a tail or… okay, maybe he'd be a bit more expanding with his horizons given how Willow looked at night. Maybe he wouldn't avoid the mixed breeds forever but he'd ease his way into it until it no longer felt weird.

"'I aspire to help my fellow man,'" came the voice of one Cordelia Chase from behind. "Check. As long as he's not smelly, dirty or something gross."

"Cordelia Chase, always ready to give a helping hand to the rich and pretty," he mocked since anyone with a brain knew that 'fellow man' meant every member of the human race.

"Which, lucky me, excludes you. Twice," Cordelia said, firing a sizzling zinger at him.

"Well, considering what I've heard about your bedside manner, I think I'm the lucky one," he said, making sure he sounded completely happy not to be helped by her. "I mean, a guy can only put up with so much prep work before it just kills the mood."

"Looking at you would kill the mood," Cordelia said, firing back as her flunkies looked on.

"Yeah? Well I heard last week the church had to find some extra room 'cause they got six new guys looking to become priests, vow of celibacy and all," he said without any difficulty. "When asked what made them choose a life devoted to God, all they said was 'Cordelia'."

He could see Cordy struggling to come up with a comeback but, while she could go with the whole 'girls chose to be nuns after seeing you', it wouldn't have the same bite since it'd just be a variation of his. Lack of imagination would mean Cordelia would lose by default.

"Why am I wasting valuable breath AND time talking to a loser like you?" Cordelia asked rhetorically as though she still had the upper hand. "Come on, girls!"

With that Cordelia and her Cordettes strutted off like they owned everything they saw.

"I'd chalk that up as a win for me, wouldn't you?" he asked Buffy and Willow with a victorious smile on his face.

"Definitely," Willow replied a big, toothy smile on her face.

They all chuckled a bit before turning back to their tests, even though it was a complete waste of time in his opinion.

"Do I like shrubs?" Buffy asked out loud, no doubt repeating the question she was on.

"That's between you and your god," he said offhand even as he jotted down the answer to his current question.

"What'd you put?" Buffy asked Willow, looking over at the redhead.

"I came down on the side of shrubs," Willow replied, keeping on the side of her usual environmentalist habits.

"Go with shrubs! Okay!" Buffy said decisively before leaning back in her seat. "Uhhh! I shouldn't even be bothering with this. It's all mootville for me. No matter what my aptitude test says, we already know my deal."

"Yup, high risk, sub-minimum wage…" he said, summarizing the job description of a Slayer.

"Pointy wooden things…" she said, not sounding optimistic.

"Better than smooth long things like Harmony," he said with a bit of humor as some imagery came into his mind. "Then again, she'd probably like it a little too much."

Buffy and Willow needed a few seconds to take his words and figure out what he was implying but he knew precisely when they did.

After all, receiving a chastising punch on each shoulder confirmed it.

"Get your mind out of the gutter, Xander," Buffy said with a bit of warning in her voice.

"What? We both know Harmony's reputation," he said innocently even though he wasn't going to make a similar comment again. "Do you really think she's qualified for anything else?"

"Well… no," Willow said, blushing red a little bit at the imagery going through her head. "But you still shouldn't go there."

With a shrug he went back to his test.

"If you don't see the point then why're you even doing it?" Willow asked after answering another of her questions.

"It's Principal Snyder's hoop of the week. He's not happy unless I'm jumping," Buffy replied, making her disdain of the troll all too clear. "Believe me, I would NOT be here otherwise."

"You're not even a teensy weensy bit curious about what kinda career you could've had?" Willow asked, sounding like she wanted her friend to consider the possibilities. "I mean, if you weren't already the Slayer and all."

"Do the words 'sealed in fate' ring any bells for you, Will? Why go there?" Buffy asked rhetorically, determined not to leave her funk.

"Y'know with that kind of attitude you could've had a bright future as an employee at the DMV," he said, shaking his pencil at her in disapproval of her pessimism.

"I'm sorry, it's just… unless Hell freezes over and every vamp in Sunnydale puts in for early retirement, I'd say my future is pretty much a non-issue," Buffy said even as she went back to her test in order to appease the troll.

"Don't be so sure," he said, determined to cheer her up, even if it was just a bit. "Before Halloween I figured I'd be lucky to get an above minimum wage job and my own apartment. Now look at me! I've got some serious mojo under the hood and I'll get to see if six generations is enough time to make the Chases into nice people."

That got a chuckle out of the Slayer and he could tell by the look in her eye that his own change of fortune had her wondering if she could experience something similar. He personally hoped so because, while he was more enthusiastic about fighting the good fight than she was, he could understand how her Calling could be more than a little rough on her. No one except a Goth would actually like having a potential death sentence dropped in their laps.

Still, Buffy had something all the Slayers that'd come before didn't have: friends.

And he didn't need to be a history buff to know that differences like that could make all the difference.

 _ **Sunnydale City Hall**_

 _ **Mayor Wilkins' POV**_

"Well, let's see… what excitement can I provide for Miss Summers now that helps the both of us?" he asked himself as he looked away from his scrying sphere.

It'd been a bit of a disappointment that Eyghon hadn't had the effect on the Slayer that he'd hoped it would, but then again he had to concede that without someone there to serve as a distraction, the old fiend had been at a disadvantage. A decaying body, after all, couldn't afford to move too quickly lest it tear itself apart. Nevertheless there was something good that came out of the encounter and, thanks to his efforts, he'd managed to conceal as well as protect it from Mister Giles' efforts. The Watcher believed and had no doubt told his young charges that Eyghon was indeed gone for good, but he knew the truth.

The sleepwalker was just waiting for the right moment to strike from within the Slayer and seize control.

The only potential problem with that plan was the fact that, should Eyghon successfully claim the body for his own and tap into the Slayer essence, he might very well try to seize control of Sunnydale.

THAT could not be allowed, not after all the hard work he'd put into reaching his ultimate goal.

However it went against his nature to help a White Hat with their problem, so the only alternative was to provide Eyghon with a measured amount of aid, then leave the rest up to chance. If he succeeded in taking Miss Summers' body then the demon would owe him a favor and he would make sure that the fiend would pay up before he did ANYTHING else. If the Slayer and her friends somehow managed to expel Eyghon in a way that was not lethal, his 'help' would make sure that she did not escape unchanged. Given the dramatic tendencies of the blonde girl, it would take her considerable time to come to terms with the after effects. Thus, so long as his minions didn't do anything to break through the fog of self-centered pitying that'd surround her during that timeframe, he'd be free to sneak a few operations right under her pert little nose undetected.

There would be risk involved but his grand plan was fraught with risks and he was still going through with it, so what was one more.

 _Perhaps a few more distractions might be called for,_ he thought with a pondering look before snapping his fingers in realization. _And fortunately it will be all too easy to link to Drusilla the Mad._

Fortunately for him, the ones he intended to employ based the competency of the agents they sent on the amount of money offered as payment.

Thus he would offer just enough to gain agents capable of garnering the Slayer's complete attention while also not being beyond her ability to overcome with the help of her altered allies. While he could certainly afford those agents capable of killing a Slayer, he did not think it wise to do so. Miss Summers' obsession with being normal, her self-destructive tendencies and her lack of dedication to her training made her a far more favorable than a dedicated Council-raised Slayer. While the latter did have their flaws, such as rigid thinking and an inability to take action without the expressed approval of their Watcher, they tended to be more dangerous than the free range ones. Therefore by keeping Miss Summers alive and in Sunnydale, he stood a better chance of achieving his goal in a little over a year.

Walking over to his locked bookcase, he spoke a quick incantation before opening it and beginning his search for the appropriate dark tome.

He'd acquired so many over the years, so it took some time.

 _ **Sunnydale High School, Later**_

 _ **Buffy's POV**_

"You and Angel are going skating? Alone?" Willow asked as they walked across the quad.

"Yeah. He said he'd wanted to do it sooner but the rink had some renovations to finish," the replied, feeling upbeat just the same. "So everything's gonna be great unless some unforeseen evil pops up. But I'm in full 'see no evil' mode."

"Angel and ice skating," Willow said, sounding a little stunned.

"I know. Two worlds collide," the said in complete agreement since the activity didn't mesh with Angel's appearance very well.

"Would you two say you know me about as well as anyone else?" Xander asked as he joined them in the quad. "Maybe even better than I know myself?"

She had to join Willow in giving Xander a weird look before the redhead spoke up.

"What's THIS about?" Willow asked with a hint of confusion.

"When you look at me do you think 'bodyguard'?" Xander asked, sounding like he couldn't quite see it himself.

She couldn't help but giggle a bit at the image her mind conjured up of Xander in a suit, with sunglasses over his eyes and a spiraling wire going to his ear. Willow joined her and, while she felt a little bad given the reaction that her best male friend had on his face, it was still funny.

"Crossing guard maybe, but bodyguard?" she asked rhetorically before shaking her head in the negative.

"I guess you're right. Still, it's what they put on the postings for the career fair and, according to my results, I can look forward to being hired to put myself in harm's way on a daily basis," he said with a bit of sarcasm before taking on an optimistic look. "Hey maybe with a little luck I'll wind up getting hired by Neve Campbell or Winona Ryder!"

"Yeah, yeah!" she said, rolling her eyes at the typical male behavior.

"Hey, it could happen!" Xander exclaimed, defending his potential future. "Give me a couple of years to get through the training and make a rep for myself and one of'em is bound to ask me to protect their body."

She just shook her head, unwilling to say anything that might egg Xander on even more.

"Scoff all you want but, just so you know, they assigned you to the booth for law enforcement professionals." Xander said with more than a little amusement.

"As in police?" she asked, unable to be more stunned if she tried.

"As in polyester, doughnuts and brutality," he replied, enjoying the reversal of woe.

She couldn't help but whine a bit at what she'd have to go through soon. After all, the time she'd experienced wherein the Sunnydale Police Department proved to be either too cowardly or too corrupt she'd hate to have to spend ANY time with whatever representative they sent. Worse than that, the idea of having to spend eight hours a day in a blue uniform that had been designed in determined ignorance of the rules of fashion… getting drowned by the Master was beginning to sound preferable.

"But, doughnuts!" Willow declared, trying to make that sound like a plus.

"Well, I'll just jump off that bridge when I come to it," she said before spotting Giles walking through the halls with a stack of books in his arms. "First I have to deal with Giles. He's on this Tony Robbins hyper-efficiency kick. Expects me to check in every day after homeroom."

With that she walked off towards the library, figuring it'd be better to have the meeting there then start talking to Giles in the hallways where people could overhear. Even if Sunnydale Syndrome kept people from listening to most of what they said, what was heard and believed would be enough to make her sound even more freaky than most students already thought she was. It didn't bother her as much as it had a couple weeks after Merrick had started her training and her social standing at Hemery began to plummet, but it still hurt a bit. To go from being one of the social elite to an outcast was never pleasant, especially when the reason you were made an outcast was saving people from vampires and demons. With how many lives she'd saved, she SO deserved a big parade in a convertible with confetti and balloons everywhere as people on either side of the street thanked her enthusiastically.

Instead she'd probably be reduced to one of the many boring chapters in the Watcher archives to be forgotten inside of fifty years. Sure, her mom would remember her, along with her friends and Giles, but everyone else would forget.

She couldn't help but growl a bit at that.

Yes, she'd heard the 'service is its own reward bit' and she did feel a little good to know that she did the right thing, but sometimes it just wasn't enough. Not for all the shit she was put through in order to save lives or the world. Would it kill those Watcher's to send her a medal or maybe a plaque every time she prevented an apocalypse? Maybe even have this private building somewhere with this big circular room in the center with bronze heads of every Slayer who'd died saving the world? With how long Giles said that they'd been around, you'd think the Council would have more than enough money to show their appreciation for a Slayer saving the day.

 _Stuffy old Brits probably don't care one bit. 'Just doing what's expected is not worthy of a reward' they probably think!_ she thought angrily as she pushed open the doors of the library. _Just another bullet to be fired._

Hearing talking coming from the office, she walked over to it all the while listening carefully to eavesdrop on what was being said.

"Do they have any idea of who else might've been sent?" Giles asked, sounding quite worried about the topic of conversation.

She couldn't hear what the response was but she could hear her Watcher getting out of his chair to begin pacing.

Not a good sign.

"Very well. Keep me apprised of any new information that pops up," Giles said, winding down the conversation. "I'll see what I can find out from more local sources."

With that the sound of the phone being hung up reached her ears so she waited patiently for Giles to emerge from his office so she could find out what was going on. She pushed her earlier anger to the side, knowing that while the other Watchers deserved it, Giles was doing all he could to help her and had been more understanding than she'd expected when she'd first met him. Until he proved himself to be no better than those that thought nothing of her dying so long as she kept the rest of the world spinning, she'd keep him blame free in her mind.

"So what's the what?" she asked as Giles exited his office.

"Buffy? Oh, good. I was hoping you'd show soon," Giles said, taking notice of her with a worried look on her face. "I just received some troubling news from the Council."

"What? Every bit of English tea has suddenly vanished from the planet, has been replaced with the American stuff and its two minutes to tea time?" she asked with a bit of a snark at what Brits would consider troubling.

"Hardly!" he replied, sounding like the very thought gave him the shivers. "I've just received word that three assassins from the Order of Taraka have been dispatched to Sunnydale. The Intelligence Division of the Council hasn't yet been able to determine who their target is but, considering their usual clientele, I fear it may be you."

"So? They come, I slay and then I go to the career fair to enjoy a presentation about my LOVELY future as a police officer," she said, not overly concerned about three new people coming to kill her.

Everything demonic and fangy that lived in Sunnydale was already trying to kill her, so what were three more in the grand scheme of things.

"This is serious, Buffy! The Order of Taraka's a society of deadly assassins dating back to King Solomon," he said with great severity. "Their credo is to sow discord and kill the unwary. They're a breed apart, Buffy. U-unlike vampires they have no earthly desires but to collect their bounty. They find a target, and, uh... they eliminate it. You can kill as many of them as you like, it won't make any difference. Where there's one, there will be another, and another. They won't stop coming until the job is done. Each one of them works alone and in their own way. Some are human, some... a-are not. Y-you won't know who they are until they strike."

"So what're you saying?" she asked, feeling a little more wary about what was likely coming her way.

"I-I think it might be best if we find someplace for you to hide out for a week or so," he replied, taking his glasses off to clean them. "Until we get a better idea of what we're up against and I can formulate a plan."

Run!? That was his plan!

"Giles, I know this is a big deal and everything but don't you think I can take them?" she asked, feeling a bit insulted that her skills as a Slayer were being dismissed.

"If they attacked you openly and directly I have little doubt you'd manage, but the number one rule of any assassin is to take the target by surprise," he replied, sensing her mood roughly. "Anyone can be slain, no matter how skilled, if they are taken by surprise. The only spot of luck you might have is that some of the assassins I've heard about enjoy playing with their prey rather than killing them as quickly and efficiently as possible."

"So my getting beat up or tortured is a good thing?" she asked, being of a very different opinion on that matter.

"The longer you're alive, the more likely I will be able to find you and come to your aid," he replied as gently as possible. "Also the longer the assassin takes, the more time you will have to turn the tables on him, her or it."

He had a point.

She still didn't like the idea of running, though. The Slayer was supposed to be this alpha predator, the thing that demons were afraid of, so it didn't make sense to run no matter how dangerous these Teriakian assassins were.

They should be AFRAID of her.

She would MAKE them afraid of her!

"No running, Giles. No hiding," she said with absolute resolve and deadly intent. "If they think killing a Slayer is going to be easy then I plan on changing their minds. PAINFULLY."

"But Buffy-" Giles tried to get out but she just turned away and left the library and him behind.

If these assassins wanted her dead then she was going to make them work for their kill and that was assuming she didn't manage to kill them instead.

All she needed was a plan and eyes in the sky courtesy of her friends.


	5. A Walk in the ParkNOT!

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the copyrighted materials contained herein They are the rightful property of their respective creators and/or associated companies. I make no profit from this whatsoever and I have no intention of changing that in the future. I write because it's fun and because there are those who enjoy reading my stories. Therefore it would be greatly appreciated if no legal action were taken against me.

PS-Positive reviews will be greatly appreciated. Constructive criticism will be considered but not necessarily acted upon. People looking to bash/insult/piss on my work for no other reason than to ruin my day and make themselves feel good will be ignored at the very least and review blocked at the very most.

 _ **Xander's POV**_

"Nothing so far, Buff," he said as he flew above the graveyard a hundred yards ahead of the Slayer.

"Same here," Willow said through the walkie-talkie she was holding. "No sign of anyone tailing you."

"Well, keep an eye out," Buffy said, sounding a bit on edge. "Giles said that these Terakians were seriously hardcore about the whole killing their target bit. Spotting them before they can make their move would be a big plus."

"Don't worry, Buffy. Between me and Willow if anything gets within two hundred yards of you we'll see it," he said reassuringly even as he continued to scan the graveyard for signs of trouble.

It'd been a bit worrying to find out that someone was sending trained assassins to Sunnydale and he agreed with Giles that the target was most likely Buffy given her status as The Slayer. However, unlike the blonde, he'd been a little more receptive to the idea of finding a place to lay low for a while until more information on who was being sent was available. After all, not knowing what your enemy could do or even what they looked like put you at a serious and potentially fatal disadvantage. Sure, the demons and vamps that normally came at them were relative unknowns as well but at least they were of species they had encountered before. A vamp was a vamp was a vamp and they all went poof when you rammed a sharp piece of wood through their undead hearts.

With these assassins they'd just have to go for old reliable and hope for the best.

What was old reliable? Highlander style; decapitation.

He'd already been warned against making any jokes about 'there could be only one'.

Philistines.

It was a general rule of thumb that nothing kept moving once you removed their head from their body.

Well, maybe certain movie zombies, but they didn't count.

However, despite his best efforts, Buffy refused to show fear or back down from the challenge coming her way so he and Willow had gone with plan B. They'd follow Buffy whichever way was most stealthy and intervene if things got too hairy for the Slayer. Fortunately the blonde was of a similar mind so here they were, following her from high enough above that they'd be difficult to see against the night sky. This did make it hard to see things on the ground as well but fortunately both Gargoyles as well as fae had pretty good night vision, so only the darkest of shadows could conceal anything from them. That was why he was a hundred yards ahead of Buffy while Willow was gliding a hundred yards behind the blonde. With enough leeway in both directions they'd be able to give Buffy ample time to get ready if something was preparing to strike be it from the front or rear.

He just hoped that none of the assassins liked using long range rifles or bows because he had no idea how to protect his blonde friend from those. Bullets travelled too fast to see and arrows, while slower, were still fast enough that he did not believe he could swoop down quickly enough to intercept it. Not for the first time he wished Giles would pick up the pace with his magical education because, while he kinda got that learning the basics was important, his battle options remained limited. Levitation was cool, hence the flying, and the molding of dirt as well as similar substances was also nice, but neither would be very effective against something moving faster than he could see.

 _So here's hoping that whoever or whatever the assassins turn out to be they prefer going toe to toe rather than ventilate from a distance._ He was fairly sure that the Hellmouth wouldn't oblige him.

He was just about to stop looking left and swivel his head back to the right when his eye spotted a flicker of light reflected off metal that hadn't been there a moment ago.

"Buffy, possible contact up ahead of you to the left. Light on metal and definitely wasn't there before," he said as he began to descend to get a better look. "I'm gonna go take a look."

"Wait for me to get there, Xan!" Buffy yelled through the walkie talkie. "Metal and you don't mix too good these days!"

"Don't worry, I'll be careful," he said as he continued his descent.

As much as he agreed that his newly awakened half fae nature made metal, particularly wrought iron, a painful hazard to him, he wasn't about to let her walk into an ambush knowing nothing but 'there is something metal waiting for you'. That being said he wasn't being stupid about it as he kept his reflexes on a hair trigger and was all ready to levitate one of the tombstones below him into the path of anything not of the good sent his way. It'd be difficult but it'd be worth it since precious few things could smash through a hundred and twenty pounds of solid granite. Even if by some chance the tombstone did break, he'd wager that much of the speed and force of whatever was propelled at him would be lost hopefully turning something lethal into something hospital worthy.

Narrowing his eyes as he tried to pierce the darkness where he saw the reflected light, he was beginning to see a shape of sorts and it was definitely humanoid.

Deciding it would be best to get the first shot in, he immediately willed control over the ground beneath the figure's feet to shoot up and wrap itself around each limb as tightly as he could manage with his magic. He'd only tried this move once against Buffy to see just how powerful something would have to be in order to break free but it'd been gratifying to find out that the Slayer had been forced to go all out to free herself. With a bit of luck whatever it was he'd just ensnared would be weaker than a maxed out Slayer and would stay put long enough to be interrogated then slain in fitting vengeance for the innocents the assassin had no doubt killed.

"Xander!" Buffy said as she came to a stop from a full sprint at his side.

"Hey. Got one assassin all tied up and ready for interrogation," he said, pointing to the figure that hadn't said a thing since he'd wrapped it in enchanted dirt. "Care to get the ball rolling?"

"With pleasure," Buffy said with a malicious grin as she approached the captured foe. "So… what brings you to Sunnydale? Is it the small town hominess, the nice locals or are you just a goth doing a tour of Californian cemeteries?"

Nothing.

Probably some kind of code of silence every Tarakan followed under pain of a messy death.

"Or are you here because someone hired you to kill me?" she asked, making it clear she knew this to be the case. "If that's the case then you should probably change careers. You aren't getting out of that dirt unless I say so and if you can't move the separating your head from your body is going to be easy. BUT, if you tell me what I want to know, maybe you can run off to some hole in the ground and I'll just tell anyone who asks that I killed you. It's not much of a choice but it beats death. Trust me, I'd know."

He grimaced slightly not liking the reminder of how his friend had almost died at the hands of The Master around half a year ago. It'd baffled and angered him how Giles and Angel could just accept the words of a prophecy while doing nothing to fight against it. The Watcher had tried to explain that the prophecies from Pergamum Codex had never failed to come to pass but he'd refused to listen. He refused to believe in things like destiny and fate because, if they really existed, then he'd been certain that he would've ended up like 'Tony'. After all, wasn't that the way that the psycho-babble went: the abused go on to be abusers themselves. The victims of drunks went on to become an alcoholic themselves. He'd hated the 'Tony' identity and the very idea that he'd turn out like that man, so he'd left to rescue Buffy if only to prove to himself that one's future was in one's own hands, NOT destiny's.

In the end he'd had to force Deadboy to lead him down into the tunnels beneath Sunnydale in order to reach The Master's lair and the sight that'd awaited them had hurt him to the core. Buffy. Lying in a pool of dirty water. Not moving. He'd raced to her side and got her out of it before giving her a once over for wounds. He'd seen the vamp bite on her neck but knew that that alone wouldn't have been enough to kill her. The only other logical possibility had been drowning. In the end though the how didn't matter nearly as much as reviving her but with Angel's excuse that he had no breath for CPR it'd all been on him.

Remembering the CPR classes pretty well he'd gone to work, speaking words of encouragement and then commandment to Buffy as he went through the steps over and over again. Eventually she'd returned to them but, painfully, the first word out of her mouth was 'Angel', as though the souled vampire had been the one to revive her. He'd swallowed his pride, they had more important things to worry about the time, but the fire of anger had lingered for quite a while after that.

When she'd used him as an improvised stripper pole to make Angel jealous at the beginning of the school year, that'd pretty much killed whatever romantic attraction he'd felt towards her. He might've been willing to give her a bit of slack due to the trauma of what she'd been through but that disgusting act was crossing the line. They were still friends, good friends, but romance would never blossom between the two of them.

"No talkie, huh? Maybe some painful persuasion will loosen your tongue," Buffy said menacingly as she walked up to the assassin.

It'd be a bit tricky to let go of individual places so Buffy could work them over with fists and feet but he could do it if he focused a bit more.

However just when he was about to set loose an arm to be broken bone by bone, Buffy froze in position as something caught her attention. He was about to ask what was wrong when she whirled around quickly with a look on her face that he recognized all too well.

They'd been snookered!

Immediately releasing the hold he had on the decoy he flew towards Buffy, intent on grabbing her before getting some serious altitude. However, before he could get more than halfway to her, a spike of pain blossomed in his right leg, shattering his concentration and sending him tumbling to the ground. The jarring impact only caused his suffering to flare but, once he came to a stop, he looked at the source to find out what'd happened only to see a metal arrow skewering his left leg a little below the knee. A rush job of estimating the origin of the arrow and he raised his right arm to use his magic to send a wave of dirt at the attack only for the foe to beat him to the punch putting an arrow through the arm. Pain fractured his consciousness once more, leaving him at a bit of a loss as to what to do next. It was clear whoever was attacking was good at strategy and an expert shot, meaning he'd need a serious distraction to get enough time to use any kind of magic.

"Wooooooooo!"

Looking up he saw Willow diving towards the source of the arrows, eyes glowing bloody crimson. Seeing things from this angle he could perceive it when the next arrow flew through the air at his best friend but, whether it was lingering instincts from Demona or luck, the redhead managed to evade. Then, with all the speed of an aerial predator, his longtime friend entered the shadows where the shots had come from, sounds of battle emerging soon after.

Taking this opportunity he reached for the arrow sticking out of his hand, intent on pulling it out so he could try a healing spell Knotgrass had used on him after a training session with Giles. However, as soon as he grasped one end of the arrow, he was forced to let go as it burned him just as bad as the letter opener had.

Wrought iron.

 _Well, it definitely explains why the pain in my hand and leg isn't going away,_ he thought even as he started to feel a little warm. _Gotta get it out. Don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that direct contact between wrought iron and my blood is a bad thing waiting to happen._

Bracing himself for the pain, he grabbed the arrow that'd pierced his hand and, even as it filled him with more pain, he pulled for all he was worth. The pain spiked and he was certain that he was mere seconds away from passing out until he threw the offending arrow away, allowing him to take a moment to physically recover.

Hearing a mountain lion roar from the shadows, he didn't know if that meant that Willow was angry or if she'd been hurt somehow but he knew he had to patch himself up quickly. Placing an undamaged hand over the one that was, he brought forth the memory of what Knotgrass had done and did his best to mimic it precisely. It wasn't easy, the pain from the arrow in his leg making his focus strain more than a little, but feeling the pain begin to fade from his injured hand he knew it was working. Visually he could see the jagged hole left by the arrow slowly start to pull itself back together but not fast enough for him to be satisfied. Willow was fighting an assassin and could be three moves from dying for all he knew! He needed to get in there and back her up!

Speaking of back up… where was Buffy?

Sure, he wasn't keeping close tabs on his watch so he didn't now PRECISELY how long it'd been since all the fighting had started but he'd like to think it'd been less than five minutes. Taking a moment to turn his head in the direction of where Buffy'd been before the assassin had hit him, he saw something that gave him a mix of good and bad feelings.

On the good side he was seeing Buffy in her fashionable and form-hugging slaying wear going all Agent Wai Lin on some African girl, who was ass kicking like Leeloo from Fifth Element, wearing clothes that did nothing to disguise how fit she was. Needless to say it was providing him with quite a bit of eye candy. However the bad part of his feelings was that, so long as the unknown girl kept Buffy tied up, she wouldn't be able to go and help Willow.

For a moment he considered trying to utilize dirt to knock the unknown girl to the side and provide an opening for Buffy but, with how fast the two of them were mixing it up, he could just as easily hit his friend.

Then he thought of a form of magic he could do that didn't particularly matter if both got hit with it. Martialling what magic he could, he thrust his hands towards the two ladies, levitating them off the ground about a foot before swinging his left and his right away from each other. As he'd partially expected the pain in his leg spiked, with the use of fae magic that didn't go well with the wrought iron, and before either girl got more than a dozen or so feet he lost his grip. Still, since the newcomer wasn't anywhere near Buffy now he reached out once more with his power over dirt but this time did something a little different. Instead of bringing the dirt up to ensnare the girl he pulled it away, causing her to drop up to her elbows in the rift he'd made. Then, just as quickly, he brought the earth back together, pinning the unknown assailant between the two sides.

"Buff! Go help Willow!" he yelled even as he could feel the African girl trying to break free. "I got this one!"

Buffy looked at her former sparring partner for a bit before looking back at him. "I'll be back as soon as I can Xan!" she said before breaking off at a sprint for where Willow could still be heard fighting the enemy archer.

 _Here's hoping it's soon enough,_ he thought even as through his magic he could feel the African girl struggling to pull an arm out of the ground.

The girl had some pretty impressive strength but he guessed that was only natural since she'd been going at it with Buffy. Even as he worked to maintain his hold on her he could feel her making progress just the same. Working as best he could he knew it'd probably be no more than ten minutes before she got her arm free and from there it'd only be a matter of time before the rest surfaced. Trying to bury her again wouldn't work because even just maintaining his hold was causing him pain as his magic slammed into or got tainted by the remaining arrow in his leg. If he could get that out and do some healing the pain would likely go away but doing that would cost him his grip on the girl and he was pretty sure from the looks she was sending him he'd regret it.

 _Hurry up, Buffy!_ he thought with rising concern. _Unlike some people, I am SO not into pain, even if it does come from a hot girl my own age._

 _ **Willow's POV**_

 _Who is this guy!?_ she thought for what had to be the twentieth time.

When she'd seen Xander get hit with arrows, she hadn't even thought before she'd centered herself on the source of the projectiles and dove towards it. On instinct alone she let out the howl that all gargoyles did in order to herald their arrival and put fear into the hearts of their foes. With her superior night vision she'd been able to pick the archer out of the shadows well enough to see when the next shot was coming and, with a flick of her wings, flowed to the side, evading the arrow. From there it was simple to tackle the assassin to the ground but the killer for hire was no slouch since he managed to use her momentum against her to throw her off. Landing with more agility than she'd even associated with herself she charged forth once more, determined to prevent the fight from turning into a long range one. Unable to determine whether the figure was human or some sort of humanoid demon, she'd refrained from using her talons or putting her full strength behind her blows.

 _Thank god Giles agreed to train me to fight,_ she thought as she ducked under her current dilemma to try another leg sweep with her tail.

Her initial approach had succeeded in letting her knock the bow from the assassin's hands but the guy proved not to be a one trick pony. He pulled out two nasty-looking curved daggers from their sheaths behind his back. From there it'd become a serious game of evasion, with both of them doing their utmost to completely evade the attacks of the others.

Giles had done his best to translate the fighting methods for humans into something she could use with her nighttime body but it hadn't been a smooth translation. While the Watcher had possessed many books on the fighting methods of demons with similar body types to her own, none of them came with a step by step record from the ones who instructed those species of demon. As a result, even though she'd managed to keep herself from being defeated in the blink of an eye, she wasn't going to win this fight on her own. Already one of the blade had managed to leave a gash in her right wing, introducing her to how much it hurt to be hit in her new limb and causing her to cry out like a jungle cat.

At least she'd managed to pay him back by lashing out with her right hand, talons bared, catching the bastard across the chest and drawing yellow blood in the process.

Since then, though, each of them had been wary of staying within range of their opponent for more than a few seconds at a time but at the same time she made sure that the distance didn't grow to the point where a bow and arrow once more became viable weapons. She'd tried once to pick up a tombstone and throw it at the assassin but, even with the suddenness of the move, the killer for hire managed to evade it just the same. At the rate things were going it'd come down to who tired enough first for the other to take advantage of the matter and end the battle.

And she wasn't one hundred percent certain it'd be her.

"Is this a private party or can anyone join in?" came a voice she was overjoyed to hear.

The assassin reacted to this new element by trying to move away from the voice while also leaving himself open to her. Too bad he'd been used to her level of speed for too long because, when compared to how fast Buffy could move, he might as well have been a turtle. With all the force of a sledgehammer the Slayer's fist slammed into the assassin's face, staggering the killer and forcing him to take a couple of steps back. Too bad for him it was Buffy's nature to press her advantage if she got one and, with the assassin off balance, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. With a bit more ruthlessness than she was used to seeing the Slayer use she laid into the one that'd been hired to kill her, alternating between blows that broke bones and ones that were only intended to be distractions. Between the two angles the fight quickly began to look entirely one sided, with the assassin losing ground with every second that passed.

Eventually desperation provoked the precise mercenary to dive in for a vicious dagger assault in the hopes of turning things back in his favor.

This was his last mistake.

With unheard of skill she sidestepped the dagger slash of the right arm, grabbing it, before forcing the dagger point towards the assassin and then kicked the killer's own legs out from under him so that he literally fell on his own weapon. She saw the tip of the dagger come out of the Tarakan's back, even if it was only half an inch of it.

THUMP!

Make that three inches of it as Buffy slammed her foot down on the assassin's back, forcing more of the dagger's blade to protrude through.

"If any of you other assassins is watching, I have one question for you…" Buffy yelled loud enough to be heard two hundred yards away. "…WHO'S NEXT?"

She had to cringe a bit at this because, while she had to admit that the Slayer had managed to dispatch the assassin at her feet with impressive skill, trying to provoke the others into attacking was not smart. Fortunately nothing happened so either there were no other assassins in the area or they weren't the sort of people to rise to that kind of bait, but whatever the reason it looked like the fighting was over with for now.

That was what she thought before Buffy turned around and began to run back towards where Xander was located. It was then that she remembered her best friend being skewered by two arrows and on instinct dropped to all fours, sprinting after the Slayer only realizing her position after the fact. Shrugging it off as something to be thought about later she continued to lope along, catching up to Buffy as they left the forest, giving them a clear line of sight to where Xander last was. What they saw though was some African teenage girl pulling herself up out of the ground with a look that made it clear that she intended to do physical harm to Xander.

Not on her watch!

Crossing the distance as quickly as she could she placed herself right in front of Xander, letting her wings flare out as wide as they could despite one being injured, letting out a warning growl without realizing it. Depending on how skilled this assassin turned out to be she might only be able to buy a minute at best but that would be a minute where she would do whatever she could in order to keep her best friend and crush safe.

"Your friend's dead and unless you want to join him your next move should be to buy a bus ticket out of Sunnydale before sunrise." Buffy said in a deadly tone that made it clear that she considered her victory a fact.

"I have no friends here, demon," the Jamaican-sounding girl said as she finally succeeded in extracting her from the ground. "I have been sent here to stop a great darkness from rising and you will not stop me."

 _Wait! Stop a great darkness from rising? That's not the sort of thing that a killer for hire would say._

"Nice try, trying to play the good guy, but I'm not buying it," Buffy said, not backing down from her position. "Good guys don't attack other good guys or even strangers without warning. You did that. That means you're the bad guy and in this town I stomp the bad guys flat!"

"You may try," the Jamaican girl said, not showing any weakness either.

However before the fight from earlier could be resumed a pot flew from out of nowhere and succeeded in striking the strange girl in the back of the head. On a hunch she turned her head to see Xander, with one arm extended and moving towards their final enemy of the evening. Looking back at the hostile girl she saw another pot streak through the air and, while it was partially deflected by the final enemy in the area, it still grazed her head disorienting her.

As a result she never noticed the fist made of dirt shoot up from the ground to punch her in the jaw with more density than one would think.

This proved to be the deciding move as the Jamaican girl dropped unconscious to the ground with a significantly sore head no doubt.

"Nice move, Xander," Buffy said as she pulled a wooden stake from her pocket. "I'll finish her off."

"Wait, Buffy!" Xander yelled, stopping the Slayer in her tracks. "Something's off here. She wasn't acting like a card carrying assassin. Plus we need more info about what we're up against."

"He's right. We should find something to tie her up with and take her back to Giles," she said, adding her bit of reason to the mix. "He'll know what to do."

For almost a minute nothing was said and Buffy seemed to be debating whether to take the advice of her friends or go with her preferred course of action. The Slayer must have been determined to portray herself as a major league player worthy of fear and was concerned that not killing the girl now might be perceived as a sign of weakness.

"Fine. You two keep an eye on her," Buffy said before she began to walk off. "I'll break off some of the metal bars off the cemetery fence to tie her up with."

Without a further word the Slayer went to do what she just said she'd do, leaving both her as well as Xander to keep an eye on their prisoner to make sure she didn't wake up, run off or kill them both.

"Do you think Buffy's taking the whole warrior badass thing a little far?" Xander asked from his position on the ground.

"Well, these are big time assassins, Xander," she replied even as she moved closer to him. "It probably takes something pretty impressive to make them think twice."

Xander nodded as he saw the logic of that.

"I just hope that it doesn't take… too many wins to make them back off," Xander said, grimacing for a moment reminding her of the arrow in his leg. "I think we might be punching just a bit out of our league."

"But Buffy managed to kill one of the assassins and the other is about to be tied up," she said, pointing out their progress thus far.

"We don't know how many there are out there, what they can do or even how many we need to kill before their 'client' runs out of money," he pointed out, much to her disappointment. "That's necessary intel."

As much as she didn't want to admit it she had to concede that flying by the seat of their pants and relying on momentum alone to see them through wasn't the smartest of moves. She just didn't like to think that hey wouldn't be able to fight them off.

She didn't want to believe that Buffy stood a real chance of dying.

 _ **Sunnydale High School**_

 _ **Library**_

 _ **Buffy's POV**_

"You're sure that she can't get out of all that?" she asked as she looked at the unconscious assassin bound by metal rods then tied to one of the library chairs by rope.

"The bars are solid steel and have been placed at key joints. I have also taken the precaution of using several rope tying techniques that are infamously difficult to undo or acquire enough leverage to break," Giles replied as he stepped away from their captive. "She would need to possess strength that was quite formidable indeed to free herself in a single effort."

"And if she is that strong?" she asked, deciding to go with the pessimistic outcome.

"Doubtful, considering you say you were able to fight relatively evenly with her. However if she was concealing the true scope of her strength and she is strong enough to render her bonds pointless… suffice it to say I pray that is not the case."

"We could just kill her now and end the threat immediately," she suggested, still not comfortable with the idea of letting an enemy into their HQ, even if it was for valuable intel. Better to kill first and get whatever answers they needed from the body or belongings.

"Buffy! I get you're trying to be all badass terminator-like but we need to make sure we're not making a mistake," Xander said, sounding shocked at her suggested course of action.

"What's the mistake? She's an assassin here to kill me and I plan on killing her first," she said, unable to understand why he was being so resistant.

"And if she's not an assassin?" he asked her as if he considered this the defining point of his argument.

"What? She attacked me! I've never seen her before in my life and she attacked me!" she exclaimed, unable to conceive how he could have come to his present conclusion.

"Just because you've never seen her before that doesn't mean she can't have a reason for attacking," he said, keeping calm in the face of her emotion. "She certainly wasn't talking like an assassin before I knocked her out."

"She was playing mind games with us! Trying to confuse us so we'd let our guard down!" she yelled, hoping that volume would help her words get through.

"While that MAY indeed be the case, Buffy, it is still a fact that the information we might gain from her makes keeping her alive worth the risk." Giles interjected.

She wanted to argue the point further but she recognized that her Watcher had superior experience and knowledge, so for the time being she'd let him have his way.

She'd still keep the short sword in her hand at the ready so that the moment the assassin revealed her true colors would be the same moment she found out what color blood lay beneath her foe's skin.

Watching as Giles cracked open the capsule of smelling salts, waving it beneath the unconscious assassin's nose. The reaction was almost instant, though it took another few seconds for coherent thought to return, but when it did the assassin made the expected effort to break free from her bonds. When no ropes snapped and the bent metal rods remained in place her wariness dimmed a bit because she could've conceive of a reason why the assassin would continue the charade of being weaker than she really was. It would've been the perfect time to roar out of the restraints, kill Giles and then try to kill her before moving on to both Xander as well as Willow. After all, brute strength would make killing humans pretty easy and she'd be thrown off her balance seeing her friends and mentor die right before her eyes, making her vulnerable until her rage snapped her into action.

Perhaps the assassin truly was captured.

If that turned out to be the case they'd pound every scrap of information out of her and THEN kill her someplace where the other assassins could find her as a warning.

"Release me," the assassin demanded, focusing her gaze on Giles.

"Not going to happen," Xander said from his chair. "But I've got a fun game we can play. It's called 'we ask questions and you give answers'. It's not always fun for the person doing the answering, 'cause for every question they don't answer they get punched in the face."

"Me? I'm hoping you decide to take a vow of silence," she said with a malicious smile.

"You will get nothing out of me, inhuman filth!" the assassin said with venom in her voice. "You may as well kill me now."

"Hey! I'm all for that idea. Got a short sword here that'd do the job nicely," she said, waving the sword so that the killer for hire would look at it.

All the assassin did was glare at her in defiance.

"While practical, I can think of a far more appropriate punishment," Giles said with an edge she didn't recall ever hearing come from him before. "I'm told that the Order of Taraka does not look kindly on agents who return alive but have failed to kill their target. However, what I find most… interesting is how they react when one of their own fails and manages to disgrace the Order at the same time. I'm told that the last one to do so is still alive but very much wishes he wasn't."

"You dare to insult ME!" the assassin yelled as she once more strained against her bonds but with redoubled vigor. "I AM THE SLAYER! I am no demonic assassin!"

There was a pause as everyone in the room was floored by the claim since it flew in the face of everything they knew or were told by people they trusted.

The reaction was equally unified. "WHAT!?"

For her, though, it was also with a healthy helping of rage since, while she might not always like the fact that she was the Slayer, a part of her did enjoy being something special. So the idea that someone else was claiming to be what she was rubbed her the wrong way. Without hesitation she stalked forwards, grabbed the assassin by the throat and held the tip of the blade less than an inch from her left eye.

"You got a lot of nerve calling yourself that but I guess you forgot to do your homework," she growled while consciously holding back her desire to push the blade all the way to the brain. "I am the Slayer. ME! BUFFY ANNE SUMMERS! And as the whole intro goes 'unto each generation a chosen ONE is born, ONE girl in all the world', so since I am the Slayer YOU cannot be!"

"It is you who lies!" the assassin growled back, not showing any fear. "Slayer Summers died less than half a year ago and then I was Called! You ally with nonhumans and dare to claim you are my fallen sister? You had best hope I never free myself from these bonds or I WILL kill you."

"Buffy, stop!" Giles yelled, causing her to look at him so fiercely he unconsciously took a step back.

Bothered by this instinctive act of his, she closed her eyes and reigned in her anger before taking two steps away from the one who claimed to be The Slayer. She never wanted her friends or the man who'd become like a father to her to EVER fear her and to think that she did for even a moment… she needed to chill out.

"If you are truly a Slayer then who is your Watcher?" Giles asked, taking control of the interrogation.

For a moment the girl wrestled with the decision to answer but eventually replied, "Samuel Zabuto."

"You know him, Giles?" Xander asked from the seat where the remaining arrow had been extracted and the wound bandaged.

"I know of him. He is a very respected Watcher and, were it not for prior obligations, Buffy might well have been assigned to him," Giles replied, taking on a more introspective tone.

"So she's telling the truth?" Willow asked from her seat on the library counter.

"Possibly. There is one way to find out for sure," Giles replied as he began to move to his office door. "I will call the Council and inquire as to the status of Watcher Zabuto and whether or not a new Slayer has truly been Called. It is an unprecedented occurrence. Since the beginning of the Slayer line there has only ever been one Called at any one time, with each successive Slayer only rising after the previous one died."

"The Master's cave!" Willow exclaimed like a lightbulb had turned on inside her head.

"What about it?" she asked, implying with her tone that she wanted to move away from that topic.

"Xander found you face down in a puddle when he got there with Angel," Willow said, sounding a bit excited that she'd found the most likely answer. "You were dead and he brought you back with CPR!"

"You mean Angel brought me back," she said, correcting the redhead on her little error.

"I thought that at first, too, but when I was doing a little light reading during lunch one day I looked into vampires. You know… in case a unique one came to Sunnydale," Willow said, sounding a little uneasy. "One of the things I found out was that vampires don't actually breathe. They can't. They just mimic breathing either out of habit or to blend in to hunt prey. I don't know if Angel knew this or not but he couldn't have done the breaths for CPR. Only Xander. So basically if Angel had been the only one to go to the Master's cave he wouldn't have been able to do CPR right."

"Of course! Even if it were only for a few minutes, Buffy's death must have been enough to trigger the Calling of the next Slayer. Then, when Xander revived you, he twinned the Slayer line!" Giles exclaimed as his Watcher mind filled in the pieces of the puzzle. "Still, the Council should have at least sent me a memo or something."

With that the Watcher entered his office to confirm both the girl's identity and the twinning of the Slayer line.

As for her, she didn't know quite how to react to the new information but one she was certain about was that she wanted the 'new Slayer' out of Sunnydale, pronto. If there was some sort of darkness rising in town then she'd be the one to handle it. This was her hometown, her territory, and she did not like the thought of having to share it, albeit temporarily, with another Slayer did not sit well with her.

"Well, this is all a little too much excitement for this small town boy," Xander said as he floated up off his chair. "I'm heading home. Knotgrass'll be able to do a bit more for my leg so hopefully I'll be able to walk normally by tomorrow."

"Need any help?" Willow asked with a bit of hopefulness.

Internally she had to smile a bit since it looked like her friend might actually be taking the initiative in her crush over Xander. Maybe her inheriting stuff from that Demona character was a little bit good after all.

"I guess two people coming home from a costume party would be easier to explain than one guy flying a foot off the ground," Xander said after a moment's thought. "Sure! Let's get going."

 _Well, at least some good's come of tonight,_ she thought as she watched the duo walk out of the library, with Xander leaning on Willow for support.

 _ **The Next Day, Sunnydale High School**_

 _ **Xander's POV**_

 _Still a little sore but nothing I can't handle,_ he thought as he walked down the hallway to the student lounge where the career stands were set up.

Knotgrass, Thistlewit and Flittle had been in an uproar last night when he'd come through the door limping. They'd been a flurry of questions and reproaching words as Willow had guided him over to a vacant chair before putting him down. Flitting about him like a swarm of angry bees they'd questioned him until he provided them with an edited account of what'd happened. He'd known that if he'd told them the uncut truth that they'd do everything in their power to make sure he couldn't go out on patrol with Buffy ever again.

Still, it'd been a bit suffocating as the three of them had flown about the house getting various ingredients for healing up his wounds while also lessening the pain. In the end they'd fretted over him until it was time for bed and then they'd followed him to his room to make sure his magic flying didn't give out along the way.

Not that they would've been able to do much in their natural states but he guessed that, if they turned into Tony or Jessica, they could keep him from hitting the floor.

By the time the sun rose and it was time to get ready for school his wounds were more or less gone, with just some lingering pain beneath the skin to worry about. Knotgrass had offered to write him a sick letter so he could stay home and heal fully but he'd turned her down. Thanks to the roles they'd been forced to play for so many years, no one would believe that Tony and Jessica Harris had suddenly decided that they cared about their son. Besides, the pain wasn't anything he hadn't dealt with before and he had little doubt that Snyder would be extra mean with the detention towards students who didn't show up.

Now he got to see what the life of a bodyguard had to offer him, even though the odds said that he'd it'd take Sunnydale vanishing from the face of the Earth to get him to leave it. He was in 'The Good Fight' for the long haul and, while he wasn't willing to go poor fighting, it he was willing to tighten his proverbial belt if the situation called for it.

As the student lounge came into view he could see that it was already bustling with activity, with the various career stations set up with the representatives standing close by. He could also see Willow standing in front of what was probably the list of who was going where in order to find out where she needed to be. Personally, even with her present condition, he felt that she was smart enough to get into any university on the planet on a full scholarship without a doubt. Also her academic prowess was so great that, even if she didn't show up for the job fair, there was little chance that Snyder would take disciplinary action against her.

"Willow!" he said from behind her, causing her to jump. "What are you doing here? Fly! Be free, little bird; you defy category!"

"I'm looking for Buffy," Willow replied, surprising him a bit given his earlier assumption.

"Haven't seen her. Not since the big surprise last night," he said after taking a moment to think.

Indeed, the idea that he'd unintentionally split the Slayer line into two had thrown him for a loop, almost as much as how hardcore Buffy had been during the interrogation of the Jamaican girl he now knew to be one Kendra Young. He'd always suspected that Slayers were alpha females, so putting two in the same room would almost certainly lead to some friction. Add that to the blonde girl's new 'Dirty Harry' attitude and he'd better hope that Kendra didn't plan on sticking around too long.

"If she doesn't get back soon, Snyder's really..." Willow said before her eyes widened and her tone changed, "...done a great job with the fair this year. Hasn't he, Xander?"

It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on and he put his best 'oh, is it not a joy to see Principal Snyder' face. It was a lie in every way that counted but it was sometimes necessary in order to keep from getting into even hotter water with the malicious midget. So long as the man held a position of authority over the student body, there was a limit to how far the Scoobies could push their luck.

"Principal Snyder! Great career fair, sir! Really! In fact, I'm so inspired by your leadership, I'm thinking principal school. I wanna walk in *your* shoes," he said before a possible impossibility occurred to him. "Not your actual shoes, of course, because you're a tiny person. Not tiny in the small sense, of course. Okay, I'm done now."

Not his best suck up speech but it was all he'd been able to come up with on the fly.

"Where is she?" Snyder asked, sneering at his efforts.

But then again what else was new.

"Who?" Willow asked, feigning ignorance even though they both knew the truth.

"You now who." Snyder growled at the feigned ignorance.

"You mean Buffy?" Willow asked before looking around for show. "I just saw her…"

"And don't feed me that 'I just saw her a minute ago, she's around here somewhere' story," Snyder said, clearly not wiling to accept any excuses.

"But I did… just see her a minute ago, and she is… AROUND here somewhere!" Willow exclaimed, trying to sound offended at the idea that she'd lie.

"For what it's worth…" he said, trying to divert some of the micro man's malice away from his best bud.

"It's worth nothing, Harris. Whatever comes out of your mouth is a meaningless waste of breath. An airborne toxic event." Snyder said with contempt in his voice.

"Well, I'm glad you feel comfortable enough to be so honest with me," he said with false cheer and politeness in his tone. "And I can only hope that one day I'm in the position to be that honest with you."

"Fascinating," Snyder said lifelessly before walking away no doubt to torment some other student.

"Well, love to stay and chat but I got an appointment with the rep from Kane Protection Services," he said, figuring Willow would get to where she needed to go without him. "Ciao."

Walking over to the booth, he saw that the representative sent to meet with him was a woman that, while dressed in a ladies business suit, definitely could not be mistaken for a secretary. If it wasn't the sharp professional look she had on her face, it was the scar mark on her left hand as she extended it to greet him.

"Mister Harris. My name is Diana Picquery and I work for Kane Protection Services," she said with the practiced smile every rep used when meeting with a stranger.

"Glad to meet you," he said, shaking the hand with casual politeness.

"Now, I'm sure you're expecting a big presentation on what Kane Protection Services but I remember what that was like when they approached me for a job. What a boring routine," Miss Picquery said, sounding rather more laid back than he'd expected a rep to be. "Instead I'll just tell you what it's like to work there and what some of the perks are. Sound good?"

"Sounds cool to me," he said, preferring the informal atmosphere developing rather than the stuffiness of prepared statements and card printed answers.

"Well, as you already know, the business I'm in is providing protection to clients from all manner of threats. Sometimes it's just for one event while in other cases it's a contract for an indefinite period of time," Diana said as she sat down in her own chair. "Naturally we gather as much information from the client as we can during the initial meetings to determine the level of protection they need."

"You mean you don't give them what they want as long as they can afford it?" he asked with a bit of puzzlement.

"Not quite," Miss Picquery replied with a shake of her head. "While we are a successful company, we have a limited number of trained agents we can assign to each client. Also, it makes bad business sense to put all your eggs in one basket, as they say."

Point.

Even if a client was wealthy enough to afford to pay the fee, they stipulated they'd be in quite a bind if that one client went belly up unexpectedly. When you had a client that you didn't think you'd be parting company with anytime soon, you planned out your future around that certainty. This normally wasn't a problem for most businesses since they usually had more than one client, so if one parted company with them they had others to fall back on. If Kane Protection Services devoted all their manpower to a single client and planned their future around that person then, if they vanished, the company would be in dire straits.

"We do single event protection, a specified period of time or indefinite contracts. If more than one person requires protection we usually assign two bodyguards to each individual but it can be reduced to one if the number of people is too high," Diana explained with a bit of discernment in her eyes. "However, if the risk factor is too great, we usually turn down the job offer."

"Risk factor?" he asked, having a pretty good idea but wanting to hear it with his own ears.

"Every field operative of Kane Protection Services is either a former member of the law enforcement community or the military. When they're hired on they're already highly trained but then we take that training to the next level in order to ensure that our clients get the best possible protection," Miss Picquery replied, her gaze never ceasing to evaluate him. "At the same time we're not about to send them into situations beyond their ability to handle. We research the potential threats we might face in taking on a specific client and insist that they disclose fully what they know should they come to us for a specific reason. If the threat they need protection from proves to be more than we can handle, we decline the job. Our employees are not expendable assets to be recklessly put in harms way."

This earned them some serious brownie points with him.

To too many people in authority the people under them were just faces and numbers that could easily be replaced. To him it was probably like that with the Watcher's Council; after all, why care about the life of one Slayer when another would be Called as soon as the previous one perished. If Diana had made it sound like her bosses cared more about the payday than they did their own employees, it would have soured his disposition considerably.

"So what're the requirements for joining up?" he asked, figuring it did no harm to find out.

"Well obviously physical fitness is essential. Protecting someone takes a toll on the body and you can't do your job if you're too busy gasping for breath," Diana replied seriously. "Skills in combat are also required but there's a side to the business most people overlook and that involves medicine. While it's great if your client can make it through an incident without a scratch on them, you need to be prepared to treat wounds, whether they are yours, your client's or someone else's. There are a few other things but we'd be sitting here all day if I had to go through them all."

 _Well, I'd have the fitness down since fighting demons or running for them helps burn the fat nicely,_ he thought as he rolled the facts around inside his head. _I'd just need to get some actual combat training of some kind, along with something two or three rungs above basic first aid._

Sure, if he could master his magic he'd probably be one of the best bodyguards on the planet but that, of course, was dependent on him actually taking the job possibility seriously.

Which he wasn't.

He'd fight side-by-side with Buffy until she died or there were no more demons on the Hellmouth, and in both cases he'd likely just relocate to the next closest paranormal hotspot before resuming.

"And assuming I did decide to become a bodyguard, how long before I'd be ready to get hired on and get assigned to a client?" he asked, figuring that even if he didn't become a bodyguard the skills would still be valuable to the Scoobies.

"Assuming you began training the moment you graduated from high school you could probably get hired on at Kane Protection Services in about five to six years. After that there'd be a minimum of two years of extra training to raise your skill levels to where the boss wants them to be."

"So basically seven years minimum."

A long time that was. Too long to leave the Hellmouth unguarded or to stay off the battlefield away from Buffy's side.

For the next hour he listened to Diana go into further detail about what she did for a living, what it involved and what sort of pay the average field operative got for their hard work. She even threw in a few funny stories about some of the clients she'd guarded, albeit without mentioning their real names but rather assigning them aliases. In the end he decided that if there were no demons, vampires or dark magic users in the world he might actually give being a bodyguard a try. The pay sounded good and, while he'd probably wind up being forced to protect complete assholes, he'd hopefully have learned enough restraint by then to keep from doing anything foolish.

If not, he had a feeling that he'd either get fired the day after he did something reckless he'd be handed his walking papers.

THAT or be treated to the mother of all drill sergeant dress downs by the boss before being suspended without pay.

 _ **Diana Picquery's POV**_

 _IT'S TRUE! IT'S REALLY, REALLY TRUE!_ she thought with glee as she walked down the streets of Sunnydale.

She had to get to her departure point and report back to her superior on the results of her investigation with all due speed. News of this importance could not be delayed even if it would spread on its own, given enough time. However, given the nature of the news, it was imperative that the director be apprised first so that he could decide what steps needed to be taken.

It had been only a short while ago that they'd begun to detect two new sources of magic in the country where before there had been none. Indeed, due to a contract that the President had been forced into at the beginning of the current century, they were forbidden from setting foot in Sunnydale unless it was under very specific circumstances. Not that anyone among them or even others would want to willingly visit the Hellmouth with all the demonic energy in the air but, given standing orders, it would've happened sooner or later if not for the contract. Given the strength of the magic detected, a full investigation had been ordered wherein all the territories looked into, whether or not a possible source had passed through in the months leading up to the detection. However, when nothing of any weight had been discovered, she had been ordered to go to the Hellmouth undercover in order to ascertain the nature of the sources.

Upon arriving in town she'd done her best to conceal her true nature while tracking down what she'd been assigned to find. It hadn't been easy but fortunately there were quite a few methods that wouldn't expose her. It'd taken awhile but, when she'd found the first of the two sources, she had been surprised that the source was a young man in his mid-teens since many back at the office had thought it to be a talisman of some sort. From there it had simply been a matter of finding a way to get close enough to examine the young man properly in order to determine enough specifics to satisfy the director. When she'd learned of the job fair occurring at the teenager's school, she'd located the representative for the job her target had been assigned to and replaced him. It'd been a little tight learning enough to maintain the deception but fortunately there'd been enough similarities between her real job and the cover that she'd been able to ad lib convincingly.

All through the 'presentation' she'd used her own particular talents to see what she'd needed to see and BOY had she been surprised by what she'd seen in the young man.

Fae were a rare breed, with many keeping to themselves in communities that were more isolated than any she knew of. Not that it was surprising, given the abundance of metal and technology in the majority of places the world over. Even with those places where technology was limited to what had been common a century ago, you'd almost never see a fae passing through. Despite that, though, the stories about them, the legends of their magical prowess, remained as strong as ever with it being the fantasy of many young ladies to find and marry a fae prince.

As a result, the fact that they had a half-fae male in America would cause all kinds of commotion throughout the country.

She'd hadn't been able to determine what rank he had among his people but the quality of the magic inside of him reminded her of one of the VIPs she'd been assigned to protect during a diplomatic function. That didn't necessarily mean that Alexander Harris was from a noble family, or even an important one since, with so few instances of fae encounters, few details were known about their magic in relation to their rank.

Whatever the truth turned out to be, she'd found out what she wanted and by pure chance had managed to discover the identity of the other in the form of a teenage girl with red hair. It hadn't been as obvious as it had been with Mister Harris but her eyes had been sharp enough to see the truth, but it had left her a bit curious. Someone with magic like Miss Rosenberg's should've been scooped up by one of the proper schools five years ago instead of being allowed to attend Sunnydale High School. Were those in charge of approaching potential students concerned because of where she'd been born? It wasn't impossible since Hellmouth's had been known to influence magic users and increase the odds of them turning dark. Some of the more ruthless people she'd overheard thought that any magic user born on a Hellmouth should be terminated immediately to eliminate a future threat. In the end it was decided that, while residents of such places wouldn't be outright barred from entry into one of the proper schools, their backgrounds would be heavily scrutinized before admittance.

Had Miss Rosenberg somehow failed her background check? Possibly.

However for a spike of her magic to have been detected from so far outside of Sunnydale, it implied that either it had just manifested or the young lady had performed an impressive feat of magic.

The former was unlikely and the latter was potentially worrisome.

Almost like clockwork those with the inborn talent for magic first exhibited their power early on in life, and once they reached their eleventh year, were recruited into one of the proper schools. It was completely unheard of that Miss Rosenberg's talent wouldn't manifest until recently. As for the latter, self-taught magic users living on top of a Hellmouth performing spells of such magnitude tended to lead to trouble. Researchers were already looking for spells, rituals and artifacts that required they be utilized with the rising or setting of the sun. Nothing fitting the facts had been found by the time she'd departed but perhaps when she got back to the office she'd find out what was going on.

She was just turning into the alleyway where she could make her getaway when out of nowhere a bolt of light shot out from the shadows at her. This had caught her completely by surprise and so her reaction time was slowed far too much for her to counter the attack, resulting in the bolt hitting the center of her chest. At once her body went rigid like a plank of lumber before falling back to the floor of the alley, with only her eyes still being able to move.

Her mind was a abuzz with questions but none were more important than 'who used the Petrificus Totalus curse on me?'.

She got her answer a moment later when two sets of footsteps began to approach her and, when the owners of the feet came into her field of vision, she was hit with feelings of both shock and fear.

"Well, well, well! Auror Picquery!" the man said with surprise that didn't reach his eyes. "Long time no see! Not since that mess in Washington with those No-Maj extremists, if I remember correctly."

"That was such a MESS!" the woman next to the man said with disgust. "But then that's what you get when you let dangerous demonic artifacts fall into the hands of the uninformed. I'd say you're getting a taste of that right now, Agent Picquery. A mess caused by lack of information, I mean."

"Indeed. Fortunately, though, my wife and I are in a position to help educate you," the man said as he flicked his wrist, causing her to rise up off the alley floor. "Of course we have questions of our own that need to be answered so there'll need to be a little quid pro quo. You don't have a problem with that Auror Picquery, do you?"

Considering who the man and woman were, she wasn't about to refuse their inquiries, even if it was the policy of the American Aurors to never give out information to others without authorization from the director.

Punishment would be preferable to what these two were capable of.


End file.
